i; 













































. 

































A HISTORY 

OF 

NINETEENTH CENTURY 

LITERATURE 

(i 780-1895) 



GEORGE SAINTSBURY 

PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE 
UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH 



Neto goth 
MACMILLAN AND CO. 

AND LONDON 
1896 

All rights reserved 



. S3 



Copyright, 1896, 
By MACMILLAN AND CO. 









Norhjooti }f!lrc3S 

J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith. 
Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 



PREFACE 

In the execution of the present task (which I took over about 
two years ago from hands worthier than mine, but then more 
occupied) some difficulties of necessity occurred which did not 
present themselves to myself when I undertook the volume of 
Elizabethan Literature, or to my immediate predecessor in 
grappling with the period between 1660 and 1780. 

The most obvious and serious of these was the question, 
"What should be done with living authors?" Independently of 
certain perils of selection and exclusion, of proportion and of 
freedom of speech, I believe it will be recognised by every one 
who has ever attempted it, that to mix estimates of work which is 
done and of work which is unfinished is to the last degree un- 
satisfactory. I therefore resolved to include no living writer, 
except Mr. Ruskin, in this volume for the purpose of detailed 
criticism, though some may be now and then mentioned in 
passing. 

Even with this limitation the task remained a rather for- 
midable one. Those who are least disposed to overvalue 
literary work in proportion as it approaches their own time will 
still acknowledge that the last hundred and fifteen years are fuller 
furnished than either of the periods of not very dissimilar length 
which have been already dealt with. The proportion of names 



NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 



of the first, or of a very high second class, is distinctly larger than 
in the eighteenth century ; the bulk of literary production is 
infinitely greater than in the Elizabethan time. Further, save in 
regard to the earliest subsections of this period, Time has not per- 
formed his office, beneficent to the reader but more beneficent 
to the historian, of sifting and riddling out writers whom it is no 
longer necessary to consider, save in a spirit of adventurous or 
affectionate antiquarianism. I must ask the reader to believe me 
when I say that many who do not appear here at all, or who are 
dismissed in a few lines, have yet been the subjects of careful 
reading on my part. If some exclusions (not due to mere over- 
sight) appear arbitrary or unjust, I would urge that this is not a 
Dictionary of Authors, nor a Catalogue of Books, but a History of 
Literature ; and that to mention everybody is as impossible as to 
say everything. As I have revised the sheets the old query has 
recurred to myself only too often, and sometimes in reference to 
very favourite books and authors of my own. Where, it may be 
asked, is Kenelm Digby and the Broad Stone of Honour ? Where 
Sir Richard Burton (as great a contrast to Digby as can well be 
imagined) ? Where Laurence Oliphant, who, but the other day, 
seemed to many clever men the cleverest man they knew ? Where 
John Foster, who provided food for the thoughtful public two 
generations ago? Where Greville of the caustic diaries, and his 
editor (latest deceased) Mr. Reeve, and Crabb Robinson, and 
many others ? Some of these and others are really neiges d'antan ; 
some baffle the historian in miniature by being rebels to brief and 
exact characterisation ; some, nay many, are simply crowded out. 
I must also ask pardon for having exercised apparently arbi- 
trary discretion in alternately separating the work of the same 
writer under different chapter-headings, and grouping it with a 
certain disregard of the strict limits of the chapter-heading itself. 



PREFACE vii 

I think I shall obtain this pardon from those who remember the 
advantage obtainable from a connected view of the progress of 
distinct literary kinds, and that, sometimes not to be foregone, 
of considering the whole work of certain writers together. 

To provide room for the greater press of material, it was 
necessary to make some slight changes of omission in the scheme 
of the earlier volumes. The opportunity of considerable gain was 
suggested in the department of extract — which obviously became 
less necessary in the case of authors many of whom are familiar, 
and hardly any accessible with real difficulty. Nor did it seem 
necessary to take up room with the bibliographical index, the 
utility of which in my Elizabethan volume I was glad to find 
almost universally recognised. This would have had to be greatly 
more voluminous here ; and it was much less necessary. With a 
very few exceptions, all the writers here included are either kept 
in print, or can be obtained without much trouble at the second- 
hand bookshops. 

To what has thus been said as to the principles of arrangement 
it cannot be necessary to add very much as to the principles of 
criticism. They are the same as those which I have always en- 
deavoured to maintain — that is to say, I have attempted to pre- 
serve a perfectly independent, and, as far as possible, a rationally 
uniform judgment, taking account of none but literary character- 
istics, but taking account of all characteristics that are literary. It 
may be, and it probably is, more and more difficult to take achro- 
matic views of literature as it becomes more and more modern ; 
it is certainly more difficult to get this achromatic character, even 
where it exists, acknowledged by contemporaries. But it has at 
least been my constant effort to attain it. 

In the circumstances, and with a view to avoid not merely 
repetition but confusion and dislocation in the body of the book, 



NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 



I have thought it better to make the concluding chapter one of 
considerably greater length than the corresponding part of the 
Elizabethan volume, and to reserve for it the greater part of what 
may be called connecting and comprehensive criticism. In this 
will be found what may be not improperly described from one 
point of view as the opening of the case, and from another as its 
summing up — the evidence which justifies both being contained 
in the earlier chapters. 

It is perhaps not improper to add that the completion of this 
book has been made a little difficult by the incidence of new 
duties, not in themselves unconnected with its subject. But I 
have done my best to prevent or supply oversight. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER I 

THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



PAGE 



The Starting-point — Covvper — Crabbe — Blake — Burns — Minor Poets 

— The Political Satirists — Gifford — Mathias — Dr. Moore, etc. — 
Paine — Godwin — Holcroft. — Beckford, etc. — Mrs. Radcliffe and 

" Monk " Lewis — Hannah More — Gilpin ..... i 

CHAPTER II 
THE NEW POETRY 

Wordsworth — Coleridge — Southey — Scott — Byron — Shelley — Keats 

— Rogers — Campbell — Moore — Leigh Hunt — Hogg — Landor 

— Minor Poets born before Tennyson — Beddoes — Sir Henry 
Taylor — Mrs. Hemans and L. E. L. — Hood and Praed 49 

CHAPTER III 

THE NEW FICTION 

Interval — Maturin — Miss Edgeworth — Miss Austen — The Waverley 
Novels — Hook — Bulwer — Dickens ■ — ■ Thackeray — Marryat — 
Lever — Minor Naval Novelists — Disraeli — Peacock — ■ Borrow — 
Miss Martineau — Miss Mitford . 1 25 



NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 



CHAPTER IV 
THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERIODICALS. 

PAGE 

New Periodicals at the beginning of the Century — Cobbett — The 
Edinburgh Review — Jeffrey — Sydney Smith — The Quarterly — 
Blackwood's and the London Magazines — Lamb — Hazlitt — Wil- 
son — Lockhart — De Quincey — Leigh Hunt — Hartley Coleridge 

— Maginn and Eraser — Sterling and the Sterling Club — Edward 
FitzGerald — Barham . . . . . . . . .166 

CHAPTER V 

THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY 

> 

' kcasional Historians — Hallam — Roscoe — Mitford — Lingard — Tur- 
ner — Palgrave — The Tytlers — Alison — Milman — Grote and 
Thirlwall — Arnold — Macaulay — Carlyle — Minor Figures — 
Buckle — Kinglake — Freeman and Green — Froude . . .211 

CHAPTER VI 

THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD 

Tennyson — Mr. and Mrs. Browning — Matthew Arnold — The Proe- 
Raphaelite Movement — Rossetti — Miss Rossetti — O'Shaughnessy 

— Thomson — Minor Poets — Lord Houghton — Aytoun — The 
Spasmodics — Minor Poets — Clough — Locker — The Earl of 
Lytton — Humorous Verse- Writers — Poetesses . . . -253 

CHAPTER VII 
THE NOVEL SINCE 1850 

Changes in the Novel — Miss Bronte — George Eliot — Charles Kingsley 

— The Trollopes — Reade — Minor Novelists — Stevenson . . 31 7 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER VIII 

PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY 

PAGE 

Limits of this and following Chapters — Bentham — Mackintosh — The 
Mills — Hamilton and the Hamiltonians — Mansel — Other Phi- 
losophers — Jurisprudents : Austin, Maine, Stephen — Political 
Economists and Malthus — The Oxford Movement — Pusey — Keble 

— Newman — The Scottish Disruption — Chalmers — Irving — 
Other Divines — Maurice — Robertson ...... 342 

CHAPTER IX 

LATER JOURNALISM AND CRITICISM IN ART AND 
LETTERS 

Changes in Periodicals — The Saturday Revieiv — Critics of the middle 
of the Century — Helps — Matthew Arnold in Prose — Mr. Ruskin 

— Jefferies — Pater — Symonds — Minto ..... 378 

CHAPTER X 

SCHOLARSHIP AND SCIENCE 

Increasing Difficulty of Selection — Porson — Conington — Munro — 
Sellar — Robertson Smith — ■ Davy — ■ Mrs. Somerville — Other 
Scientific Writers — Darwin — Vestiges of Creation — Hugh Miller 

— Huxley ........... 404 

CHAPTER XI 



Weakness of this department throughout- — O'Keefe — Joanna Paillie 
— Knowles — Bulwer — Planche ....... 



417 



NINETEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE 



CHAPTER XII 

CONCLUSION 

PAGE 

Survey and Analysis of the Period in the several divisions — Revolutions 

in Style — The present state of Literature ..... 425 

INDEX .....'..... .471 



CHAPTER I 

THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 

The period of English literary history which is dealt with in the 
opening part of the present volume includes, of necessity, among 
its most illustrious names, not a few whose work will not be the 
subject of formal discussion here, because the major part of it was 
done within the scope of the volume which preceded. Thus, to 
mention only one of these names, the most splendid displays of 
Burke's power — the efforts in which he at last gave to mankind 
what had previously been too often devoted to party — date from 
this time, and even from the later part of it ; while Gibbon did 
not die till 1794, and Horace Walpole not till 1797. Even 
Johnson, the type and dictator at once of the eighteenth century 
in literary England, survived the date of 1780 by four years. 

Nevertheless the beginning of the ninth decade of the century 
did actually correspond with a real change, a real line of demar- 
cation. Not only did the old writers drop off one by one, not 
only did no new writers of utterly distinct idiosyncrasy (Burns 
and Blake excepted) make their appearance till quite the end of it, 
but it was also marked by the appearance of men of letters and 
of literary styles which announced, if not very distinctly, the 
coming of changes of the most sweeping kind. Hard as it may 
be to exhibit the exact contrast between, say, Goldsmith and men 
like Cowper on the one side and Crabbe on the other, that 
contrast cannot but be felt by every reader who has used himself 



2 THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY chap. 

in the very least to the consideration of literary differences. And 
as with individuals, so with kinds. No special production of 
these twenty years may be of the highest value ; but there is a 
certain idiosyncrasy, if only an idiosyncrasy of transition — an 
unlikeness to anything that comes before, and to anything, unless 
directly imitated, that comes after — which is equally distinguish- 
able in the curious succession of poetical satires from Peter Pindar 
to the Anti-Jacobin, in the terror-and-mystery novels of the school 
of Mrs. Radcliffe and Monk Lewis, in the large, if not from the 
literary point of view extremely noteworthy, department of poli- 
tics and economics which in various ways employed the pens of 
writers so different as Moore, Young, Godwin, Priestley, Home, 
Tooke, Cobbett, and Paine. 

Giving poetry, as usual, the precedence even in the most 
unpoetical periods, we shall find in the four names already cited — 
those of Crabbe, Cowper, Blake, and Burns — examples of which 
even the most poetical period need not be ashamed. In what 
may be called the absolute spirit of poetry, the nescio quid which 
makes the greatest poets, no one has ever surpassed Burns and 
Blake at their best ; though the perfection of Burns is limited in 
kind, and the perfection of Blake still more limited in duration 
and sustained force. Cowper would have been a great poet of 
the second class at any time, and in some times might have 
attained the first. As for Crabbe, he very seldom has the absolute 
spirit of poetry just mentioned ; but the vigour and the distinc- 
tion of his verse, as well as his wonderful faculty of observation 
in rendering scene and character, are undeniable. And it is not 
perhaps childish to point out that there is something odd and out 
of the way about the poetical career of all these poets of the 
transition. Cowper's terrible malady postpones his first efforts in 
song to an age when most poets are losing their voices ; Crabbe, 
beginning brilliantly and popularly, relapses into a silence of nearly 
a quarter of a century before breaking out with greater power and 
skill than ever ; Burns runs one of the shortest, if one of the most 
brilliant, Blake one of the longest, the strangest, the most inter- 



I COWPER 3 

mittent, of poetical careers. Nor is it superfluous to draw atten- 
tion further to the fact that when we leave this little company — 
at the best august, at the worst more than respectable — we drop 
suddenly to the flattest and most hopeless bog of poesiless verse 
that lies anywhere on the map of England's literature. Passing 
from the ethereal music of the Scottish ploughman and the English 
painter, from Cowper's noble or gentle thought and his accom- 
plished versification, from Crabbe's manly vigour and his Rem- 
brandt touch, we find nothing, unless it be the ingenious but not 
strictly poetical burlesque of the Wolcots and the Lawrences, till 
we come to the drivel of Hayley and the drought of Darwin. 

Of the quartette, William Cowper was by far the oldest ; the 
other three being contemporaries within a few years. He was 
born on 26th November 1731 at Great Berkhampstead. His 
father was a clergyman and a royal chaplain, his mother one of 
the Norfolk Donnes. Her early death, and that school discom- 
fort which afterwards found vent in Tirocinium, appear to have 
aggravated a natural melancholia ; though after leaving West- 
minster, and during his normal studies at both branches of the 
law, he seems to have been cheerful enough. How what should 
have been the making of his fortune, — his appointment as Clerk 
of the Journals to the House of Lords, — not unassisted by relig- 
ious mania, drove him through sheer nervousness to attempt sui- 
cide, is one of the best known things in English literary biography, 
as indeed are most of the few events of his sad life, — owing partly 
to his own charming letters, partly to the biographies of Southey 
and others. His latest days were his unhappiest, and after years 
of more or less complete loss of reason he died on 27th April 
1800. 

It has been said that Cowper did not take to writing till late 
in life. He had had literary friends — Churchill, Lloyd, and 
others — in youth, and must always have had literary sympathies ; 
but it was not till he was nearly fifty, nor till the greater part of 
twenty years after his first mental seizure, that he attempted com- 
position at the instance of his friend Newton and the Unwins. 



4 THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY chap. * 

Beginning with hymns and trifles, he before long undertook, at 
this or that person's suggestion, longer poems, such as Truth, The 
Progress of Error, and Expostulation, which were finished by 
1 78 1 and published next year, to be followed by the still better 
and more famous Task, suggested to him by Lady Austen. This 
appeared in 1785, and was very popular. He had already begun 
to translate Homer, which occupied him for the greater part of 
seven years. Nothing perhaps settled him more in the public 
affections than "John Gilpin," the subject of which he also owed 
to Lady Austen ; and he continued to write occasional pieces of 
exquisite accomplishment. Almost the last, if not actually the 
last, of these, written just before the final obscuration of his 
faculties, was the beautiful and terrible " Castaway," an avowed 
allegory of his own condition. 

Cowper, even more than most writers, deserves and requites 
consideration under the double aspect of matter and form. In 
both he did much to alter the generally accepted conditions of 
English poetry ; and if his formal services have perhaps received 
less attention than they merit, his material achievements have 
never been denied. His disposition — in which, by a common 
enough contrast, the blackest and most hopeless melancholy was 
accompanied by the merriest and most playful humour — reflected 
itself unequally in his verse, the lighter side chiefly being exhibited. 
Except in " The Castaway," and a few — not many — of the hymns, 
Cowper is the very reverse of a gloomy poet. His amiability, 
however, could also pass into very strong moral indignation, and 
he endeavoured to give voice to this in a somewhat novel kind of 
satire, more serious and earnest than that of Pope, much less 
political and personal than that of Dryden, lighter and more 
restrained than that of the Elizabethans. His own unworldly 
disposition, together with the excessively retired life which he had 
led since early manhood, rather damaged the chances of Cowper 
as a satirist. We always feel that his censure wants actuality, 
that it is an exercise rather than an experience. His efforts in it, 
however, no doubt assisted, and were assisted by, that alteration 



EIGHTEENTH CENTURY CONVENTION 



of the fashionable Popian couplet which, after the example partly 
of Churchill and with a considerable return to Dryden, he 
attempted, made popular, and handed on to the next generation 
to dis-Pope yet further. This couplet, paralleled by a not wholly 
dissimilar refashioning of blank verse, in which, though not 
deserting Milton, he beat out for himself a scheme quite 
different from Thomson's, perhaps show at their best in the 
descriptive matter of The Task and similar poems. It was in 
these that Cowper chiefly displayed that faculty of " bringing 
back the eye to the object " and the object to the eye, in which 
he has been commonly and justly thought to be the great English 
restorer. Long before the end of the Elizabethan period, poetical 
observation of nature had ceased to be just ; and, after substituting 
for justness the wildest eccentricities of conceit, it went for a long 
time into another extreme — that of copying and recopying certain 
academic conventionalities, instead of even attempting the natural 
model. It is not true, as Wordsworth and others have said, that 
Dryden himself could not draw from the life. He could and 
did ; but his genius was not specially attracted to such drawing, 
his subjects did not usually call for it, and his readers did not 
want it. It is not true that Thomson could not " see " ; nor is it 
true of all his contemporaries and immediate followers that they 
were blind. But the eighteenth century had slipped into a fault 
which was at least as fatal as that of the Idealist-Impressionists of 
the seventeenth, or as that of the Realist-Impressionists of our 
own time. The former neglected universality in their hunt after 
personal conceits ; the latter neglect it in the endeavour to add 
nothing to rigidly elaborated personaL sensation. The one kind 
outstrips nature ; the other comes short of art. From Dryden to 
Cowper the fault was different from both of these. It neglected 
the personal impression and the attention to nature too much. 
It dared not present either without stewing them in a sauce of 
stock ideas, stock conventions, stock words and phrases, which 
equally missed the universal and the particular. Cowper and 
the other great men who were his contemporaries by publication 



6 THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY chap. 

if not by birth, set to work to cure this fault. Even the weakest 
of them could never have been guilty of such a passage as that 
famous one which Congreve (as clever a man as any) wrote, and 
which Johnson (as clever a man as any) admired. The sentiment 
which actuated them was, if we may trust Coleridge's account of 
Boyer or Bowyer, the famous tyrant of Christ's Hospital, well 
diffused. "'Nymph,' boy? You mean your nurse's daughter," 
puts in a somewhat brutal and narrow form the correction which 
the time needed, and which these four in their different ways 
applied. 

We have already glanced at the way in which Cowper applied 
it in his larger poems : he did it equally well, and perhaps more 
tellingly, in his smaller. The day on which a poet of no mean 
pretensions, one belonging altogether to the upper classes of 
English society, and one whose lack of university education mat- 
tered the less because the universities were just then at their 
nadir, dared to write of the snake he killed 

" And taught him never to come there no more " 

was an epoch-making day. Swift would have done it ; but Swift 
was in many ways a voice crying in the wilderness, and Swift was 
not, strictly speaking, a poet at all. Byrom would have done it ; 
but Byrom was emphatically a minor poet. Cowper could — at 
least in and for his day — boast the major afflatus, and Cowper 
did not disdain vernacular truth. He never could have been 
vulgar ; there is not in the whole range of English literature quite 
such a gentleman in his own way as Cowper. But he has escaped 
almost entirely from the genteel style — from the notion of things 
as below the dignity of literature. 

His prose in this respect is at least equal to his verse, though, 
as it was known much later, it has greater tendency than influence. 
All good critics have agreed that his letters are not surpassed, 
perhaps not surpassable. He has more freedom than Gray ; he 
has none of the coxcombry of Walpole and Byron ; and there is 
no fifth name that can be put even into competition with him. 



i CRABBE 7 

Ease, correctness, facility of expression, freedom from convention 
within his range, harmony, truth to nature, truth to art : — these 
things meet in the hapless recluse of Olney as they had not met for 
a century — perhaps as they had never met — in English epistles. 
The one thing that he wanted was strength : as his madness was 
melancholy, not raving, so was his sanity mild but not triumphant. 

George Crabbe was three and twenty years younger than 
Cowper, having been born on Christmas Eve 1754. But his first 
publication, The Library, the success of which was due to the 
generous and quick-sighted patronage of Burke after the poet 
had wrestled with a hard youth, coincided almost exactly with the 
first appearance of Cowper, and indeed a little anticipated it. 
The Village appeared in 1783, and The Newspaper in 1785, and 
then Crabbe (who had taken orders, had been instituted to 
livings in the East of England, and had married, after a long 
engagement, his first love) was silent for two and twenty years. 
He began again in 1807 with The Parish Register. The Borough, 
his greatest work, appeared in 18 10. Shifting from the East 
of England to the West in 181 3, he spent the last twenty years 
of his long life at Trowbridge in Wiltshire, and died in 1832 at 
the age of seventy-eight. 

The external (and, as will be presently remarked, something 
more than the external) uniformity of his work is great, and its 
external conformity to the traditions and expectations of the time 
at which it first appeared is almost greater. A hasty judgment, 
and even one which, though not hasty, is not very keen-sighted, 
might see little difference between Crabbe and any poet from 
Pope to Goldsmith except the innovators. He is all but con- 
stant to the heroic couplet — the Spenserian introduction to The 
Birth of Flattery, the variously-grouped octosyllabic quatrains of 
Reflections, Sir Eustace Grey, The Hall of Justice, and Woman, 
with a few other deviations, being merely islets among a wide sea 
of rhymed decasyllables constituting at least nineteen-twentieths 
of the poet's outpouring. Moreover, he was as a rule constant, 
not merely to the couplet, but to what has been called the " shut " 



8 THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY chap. 

couplet — the couplet more or less rigidly confined to itself, and 
not overlapping. But he did sometimes overlap, and either in 
fealty to Dryden, or from a secret feeling of the craving for freedom 
which his more lawless contemporaries expressed in other ways, 
he reverted to the Drydenian triplet and Alexandrine on which 
Pope had frowned. In Crabbe's couplet, too, there is something 
which distinguishes it from almost all others. This something 
varies very much in appeal. It is sometimes, nay, too often, a 
rather ludicrous something, possessing a sort of awkward prosaic 
" flop," which is excellently caricatured in Rejected Addresses. 
But it always shows signs of a desire to throw the emphasis with 
more variation than the icy uniformity of the Popian cadence 
admitted ; and it is sometimes curiously -effective. 

Crabbe's position, independently of the strange gap in his 
publication (which has been variously accounted for), is not a 
little singular. The greater and the better part of his work was 
composed when the Romantic revival was in full swing, but it 
shows little or no trace of the influence of that revival in versifica- 
tion or diction. His earliest attempts do indeed show the same 
reaction from Pope to Dryden (of whom we know that he was an 
eager student) which is visible in Cowper and Churchill ; and 
throughout his work, both earlier and later, there is a ruthless 
discarding of conventional imagery and a stern attention to the 
realities of scenery and character. But Crabbe has none of the 
Grace of the new dispensation, if he has some glimpses of its 
Law. He sails so close to the wind of poetry that he is some- 
times merely prosaic and often nearly so. His conception of life 
is anti-idealist almost to pessimism, and he has no fancy. The 
"jewels five words long " are not his : indeed there clung to him a 
certain obscurity of expression which Johnson is said to have good- 
naturedly smoothed out in his first work to some extent, but from 
which he never got quite free. The extravagances as well as the 
graces of the new poetry were quite alien from him ; its exotic 
tastes touched him not ; its love for antiquity (though he knew 
old English poetry by no means ill) seems to have left him 



BLAKE — BURNS 



wholly cold. The anxieties and sufferings of lower and middle- 
class life, the " natural death of love " (which, there seems some 
reason to fear, he had experienced), the common English country 
scenery and society of his time — these were his subjects, and he 
dealt with them in a fashion the mastery of which is to this day 
a joy to all competent readers. No writer of his time had an 
influence which so made for truth pure and simple, yet not 
untouched by the necessary " disprosing " processes of art. For 
Crabbe is not a mere realist ; and whoso considers him as such 
has not apprehended him. But he was a realist to this extent, 
that he always went to the model and never to the pattern- 
drawing on the Academy walls. And that was what his time 
needed. His general characteristics are extremely uniform : even 
the external shape and internal subject-matter of his poems are 
almost confined to the shape and matter of the verse-tale. He 
need not, and indeed cannot, in a book like this, be dealt with at 
much length. But he is a very great writer, and a most important 
figure at this turning-point of English literature. 

Yet, however one may sympathise with Cowper, however much 
one may admire Crabbe, it is difficult for any true lover of poetry 
not to feel the sense of a " Pisgah sight," and something more, of 
the promised land of poetry, in passing from these writers to 
William Blake and Robert Burns. Here there is no more allow- 
ance necessary, except in the first case for imperfection of accom- 
plishment, in the second for shortness of life and comparative 
narrowness of range. The quality and opportuneness of poetry are 
in each case undeniable. Since the deaths of Herrick and Vaughan, 
England had not seen any one who had the finer lyrical gifts of 
the poet as Blake had them. Since the death of Dunbar, Scot- 
land had not seen such strength and intensity of poetic genius 
(joined in this case to a gift of melody which Dunbar never had) 
as were shown by Burns. There was scarcely more than a 
twelvemonth between their births ; for Blake was born in 1757 
(the day appears not to be known), and Burns in January 1759. 
But Blake long outlived Burns, and did not die till 1828, while 



io THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY chap. 

Burns was no more in July 1796. Neither the long life nor the 
short one provided any events which demand chronicling here. 
Both poets were rather fortunate in their wives, though Blake 
clave to Catherine Boucher more constantly than Burns to his 
Jean. Neither was well provided with this world's goods ; Burns 
wearing out his short life in difficulties as farmer and as excise- 
man, while all the piety of biographers has left it something of a 
mystery how Blake got through his long life with no better 
resources than a few very poorly paid private commissions for his 
works of design, the sale of his hand-made books of poetry and 
prophecy, and such occasional employment in engraving as his 
unconventional style and his still more unconventional habits and 
temper allowed him to accept or to keep. In some respects the 
two were different enough according to commonplace standards, less 
so perhaps according to others. The forty years of Burns, and the 
more than seventy of Blake, were equally passed in a rapture ; but 
morality has less quarrel with Blake, who was essentially a " God- 
intoxicated man " and spent his life in one long dream of art 
and prophecy, than with Burns, who was generally in love, and 
not unfrequently in liquor. But we need no more either of 
antithesis or of comparison : the purely literary matter calls us. 

It was in 1783 — a date which, in its close approximation to 
the first appearances of Crabbe and Cowper, makes the literary 
student think of another group of first appearances in the early 
" eighties " of the sixteenth century foreshadowing the outburst 
of Elizabethan literature — that Blake's first book appeared. His 
Poetical Sketches, now one of the rarest volumes of English 
poetry, was printed by subscription among a literary coterie who 
met at the house of Mr. and Mrs. Mathew ; but the whole edition 
was given to the author. He had avowedly taken little or no 
trouble to correct it, and the text is nearly as corrupt as that of 
the Supplices ; nor does it seem that he took any trouble to make 
it " go off," nor that it did go off in any appreciable manner. 
Yet if many ears had then been open to true poetical music, some 
of them could not have mistaken sounds the like of which had 



i BLAKE 1 1 

not, as has been said, been heard since the deaths of Herrick and 
Vaughan. The merit of the contents is unequal to a degree not 
.to be accounted for by the mere neglect to prepare carefully for 
press, and the influence of Ossian is, as throughout Blake's work, 
much more prominent for evil than for good. But the chaotic 
play of Edward the Third is not mere Elizabethan imitation ; and 
at least half a dozen of the songs and lyrical pieces are of the 
most exquisite quality — snatches of Shakespeare or Fletcher as 
Shakespeare or Fletcher might have written them in Blake's time. 
The finest of all no doubt is the magnificent "Mad Song." But 
others — "How sweet I roamed from Field to Field " (the most 
eighteenth century in manner, but showing how even that manner 
could be strengthened and sweetened) ; " My Silks and Fine 
Array," beautiful, but more like an Elizabethan imitation than 
most; " Memory Hither Come," a piece of ineffable melody — 
these are things which at once showed Blake to be free of the 
very first company of poets, to be a poet who for real essence of 
poetry excelled everything the century had yet seen, and every- 
thing, with the solitary exception of the Lyrical Ballads at its 
extreme end, that it was to see. 

Unfortunately it was not by any means as a poet that Blake 
regarded himself. He knew that he was an artist, and he thought 
that he was a prophet ; and for the rest of his life, deviating only 
now and then into engraving as a mere breadwinner, he devoted 
himself to the joint cultivation of these two gifts, inventing for 
the purpose a method or vehicle of publication excellently suited 
to his genius, but in other respects hardly convenient. This 
method was to execute text and illustrations at once on copper- 
plates, which were then treated in slightly different fashions. 
Impressions worked off from these by hand-press were coloured 
by hand, Blake and his wife executing the entire process. In 
this fashion were produced the lovely little gems of literature and 
design called Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience 
(1794) ■ in this way for the most part, but with some modifica- 
tions, the vast and formidable mass of the so-called " Prophetic " 



12 THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY chap. 

Books. With the artistic qualities of Blake we are not here con- 
cerned, but it is permissible to remark that they resemble his 
literary qualities with a closeness which at once explains and is 
explained by their strangely combined method of production. 
That Blake was not entirely sane has never been doubted except 
by a few fanatics of mysticism, who seem to think that the denial 
of complete sanity implies a complete denial of genius. And 
though he was never, in the common phrase, " incapable of man- 
aging " such very modest affairs as were his, the defect appears 
most in the obstinate fashion in which he refused to perfect and 
co-ordinate his work. He could, when he chose and would give 
himself the trouble, draw quite exquisitely ; and he always drew 
with marvellous vigour and imagination. But he would often 
permit himself faults of drawing quite inexplicable and not very 
tolerable. So, too, though he had the finest gift of literary ex- 
pression, he chose often to babble and still oftener to rant at large. 
Even the Songs of Innocence and Experience — despite their double 
charm to the eye and the ear, and the presence of such things as 
the famous " Tiger," as the two " Introductions " (two of Blake's 
best things), and as "The Little Girl Lost" — show a certain 
poetical declension from the highest heights of the Poetical 
Sketches. The poet is no longer a poet pure and simple ; he has 
got purposes and messages, and these partly strangle and partly 
render turbid the clear and spontaneous jets of poetry which 
refresh us in the " Mad Song " and the " Memory." And after 
the Songs Blake did not care to put forth anything bearing the 
ordinary form of poetry. We possess indeed other poetical work 
of his, recovered in scraps and fragments from MSS., and some of 
it is beautiful. But it is as a rule more chaotic than the Sketches 
themselves ; it is sometimes defaced (being indeed mere private 
jottings never intended for print) by personality and coarse- 
ness ; and it is constantly puddled with the jargon of Blake's 
mystical philosophy, which, borrowing some of its method from 
Swedenborg and much of its imagery and nomenclature from 
Ossian, spreads itself unhampered by any form whatever over the 



I BURNS 13 

Prophetic Books. The literary merit of these in parts is often very 
high, and their theosophy (for that is the best single word for it) is 
not seldom majestic. But despite the attempts of some disciples 
to evolve a regular system from them, students of philosophy as 
well as of literature are never likely to be at much odds as to 
their real character. " Ravings " they are not, and they are very 
often the reverse of " nonsense." But they are the work of a 
man who in the first place was very slightly acquainted with the 
literature and antecedents of his subject, who in the second was 
distinctly non compos on the critical, though admirably gifted on 
the creative side of his brain, and who in the third had the ill 
luck to fall under the fullest sway of the Ossianic influence. To 
any one who loves and admires Blake — and the present writer 
deliberately ranks him as the greatest and most delectable poet 
of the eighteenth century proper in England, reserving Burns as 
specially Scotch — it must always be tempting to say more of him 
than can be allowed on such a scale as the present ; but the scale 
must be observed. 

There is all the more reason for the observance that Blake 
exercised on the literary history of his time no influence, and 
occupied in it no position. He always had a few faithful friends 
and patrons who kept him from starvation by their commissions, 
admired him, believed in him, and did him such good turns as 
his intensely independent and rather irritable disposition would 
allow. But the public had little opportunity of seeing his pictures, 
and less of reading his books ; and though the admiration of Lamb 
led to some appreciation from Southey and others, he was practi- 
cally an unread man. This cannot be said of Robert Burns, who, 
born as was said a year or two after Blake, made his first literary 
venture three years after him, in 1786. Most people know that 
the publication, now famous and costly, called " the Kilmarnock 
Edition," was originally issued in the main hope of paying the poet's 
passage to Jamaica after an unfortunate youth of struggle, and 
latterly of dissipation. Nay, even after the appearance of the 
Poems and their welcome he still proposed to go abroad. He was 



14 



nir. end of nil-: eighteenth century 



summoned back to Edinburgh to reprint them, to make a consider- 
able profit by them, and to be lionised without stint by the society 
of the Scottish capital. He then settled down, marrying Jean 
Armour, at Kllisland in Dumfriesshire, on a small farm and a post 
in the Excise, which, when his farming failed and he moved to 
Dumfries itself, became his only regular means of support. He 
might have increased this considerably by literature ; but as it was 
he actually gave away, or disposed of for trifling equivalents, most 
of the exquisite songs which he wrote in his later years. These 
years were unhappy. He hailed the French Revolution with a 
perfectly innocent, because obviously ignorant. Jacobinism which, 
putting all other considerations aside, was clearly improper in a 
salaried official of the Crown, and thereby got into disgrace with 
the authorities, and also with society in and about Dumfries. His 
habits of living, though their recklessness has been vastly e\a. 
ated, wore not careful, and helped to injure both his reputation 
and his health. Before long he broke down completely, and died 
on the first of July 1796, his poetical powers being to the very last 
in fullest perfection. 

Burns' work, which even in bulk — its least remarkable char- 
acteristic — is very considerable when his short life and his un- 
favourable education and circumstances are reckoned, falls at 
once into three sharply contrasted sections. There are his poems 
in Scots ; there are the verses that, in obedience partly to the 
incompetent criticism of his time, partly to a very natural mistake 
of ambition and ignorance, he tried to write in conventional 
literary English ; and there is his prose, taking the form of more 
or less studied letters. The second class of the poems is almost 
worthless, and fortunately it is not bulky. The letters are of 
unequal value, and have been variously estimated. They show 
indeed that, like almost all poets, he might, if choice and fate 
had united, have become a very considerable prose-writer, and 
they have immense autobiographic value. But they are some- 
times, and perhaps often, written as much in falsetto as the division 
of verse just ruled out; their artificiality does not take very good 



I BURNS 15 

models ; and their literary attraction is altogether second-rate. 
How far different the value of the Scots poems is, four generations 
have on the whole securely agreed. The moral discomfort of 
Principal Shairp, the academic distaste of Mr. Matthew Arnold 
for a world of " Scotch wit, Scotch religion, and Scotch drink," 
and the purely indolent and ignorant reluctance of others to 
grapple with Scottish dialect, need not trouble the catholic critic 
much. The two first may be of some use as cautions and drags ; 
the third may be thrown aside at once. Scots, though a dialect, 
is not a patois; it has a great and continuous literature; it com- 
bines in an extraordinary degree the consonant virtues of English 
and the vowel range of the Latin tongues. It is true that Burns' 
range of subject, as distinct from that of sound, was not extremely 
wide. He could give a voice to passion — passion of war, passion of 
conviviality, passion above all of love — as none but the very greatest 
poets ever have given or will give it ; he had also an extraordinary 
command of gen re -painting of all kinds, ranging from the merely 
descriptive and observant to the most intensely satirical. Perhaps 
he could only do these two things — could not be (as he certainly 
has not been) philosophical, deeply meditative, elaborately in 
command of the great possibilities of nature, political, moral, 
argumentative. But what an "only" have we here ! It amounts 
to this, that Burns could "only" seize, could "only" convey the 
charms of poetical expression to, the more primitive thought and 
feeling of the natural man, and that he could do this supremely. 
His ideas are — to use the rough old Lockian division — ideas of 
sensation, not of reflection ; and when he goes beyond them he is 
sensible, healthy, respectable, but not deep or high. In his own 
range there are few depths or heights to which he has not soared 
or plunged. 

That he owed a good deal to his own Scottish predecessors, 
especially to Ferguson, is not now denied ; and his methods of 
composing his songs are very different from those which a lesser 
man, using more academic forms, could venture upon without 
the certainty of the charge of plagiarism. We shall never under- 



t6 illl- END OF rill- EIGHTEENTH CENTURY chap. 

stand Burns aright if we do not grasp the fact that he was .1 

"folk poet,"' into whom the soul of a poet of all time ami all space 
had entered. In all times and countries where folk-poetry has a 
genuine existence, its forms and expressions are much less the 
property of the individual than o( the race. The business of collect- 
ing ballads is one of the most difficult and doubtful, not to say 
dangerous, open to the amateur. But it is certain that any collector 
who was not a mere simpleton would at once reject as spurious 
a version which he heard in identically the same terms from two 
different subjects. He would know that they must have got it 
from a printed or at least written source. Now burns is. if not 
our only example, our only example of the very first quality, of the 

who takes existing work and hands it on shaped to his own 
fashion. Not that he was not perfectly competent to do without 
any existing canvas : while, when he had it. he treated it without 
the very slightest punctilio. Of some oi the songs which he 
reshaped into masterpieces for Johnson and Thomson he took no 
more than the air and measure : of others only the refrain or the 
fust few lines ; of others again stanzas or parts of stanzas. But 
everywhere he has stamped the version with something of his 
own -something thenceforward inseparable from it. and yet char- 
acteristic of him. In the expression of the triumph and despair 
of love, not sicklied over with any thought as in most modern 
poets, only Catullus and Sappho can touch burns. " Green grow 
the Rashes O," ••Yestreen I had a Pint of Wine," the farewell to 
Clarinda, and the famous deathbed verses to Jessie Lewars, make 
any advance on them impossible in point of spontaneous and un- 
reflecting emotion ; while a thousand others (the number is hardly 
ne but little behind. "Willie brew'd a Peel 
way rid.es sovereign at the head of a 
bacchanalian verses : and the touches of rhetoric and convention 
in "Scots wha s d hardly even injure it. To 

• . ms that the much praised lines •' bo Mary in 
. the mood is less Sj show 

- ..: less advantage, n se the kind is inferior, but 



BURNS 



'7 



because he was less at home in it ; but it is almost impossible to 
praise too highly the equally famous " Mouse," and some other 
things. It was in this tremendous force of natural passion and 
affection, and in His simple observation of common things, that 
Burns' great lesson for his age and country lay. None even of the 
reformers had dared to be passionate as yet. In Cowper indeed 
there was no passion except of religious despair, in Crabbe none 
except that of a grim contemplation of the miseries and dis- 
appointments of life, while although there was plenty of passion 
in Blake it had all conveyed itself into the channel of mystical 
dreaming. It is a little pathetic, and more than a little curious, 
to compare "The Star that shines on Anna's Breast," the one 
approach to passionate expression of Cowper's one decided love, 
with any one of a hundred outbursts of Burns, sometimes to the 
very same name. 

The other division of the Poems, at the head of which stand 
The Jolly Beggars, Tain <f Shanter, and The Holy Fair, exhibit 
an equal power of vivid feeling and expression with a greater 
creative and observant faculty, and were almost equally important 
as a corrective and alterative to their generation. The age was 
not ill either at drama, at manners-painting, or at satire ; but the 
special kind of dramatic, pictorial, and satiric presentation which 
Burns manifested was quite unfamiliar to it and in direct contra- 
diction to its habits and crotchets. It had had a tendency to look 
only at upper and middle-class life, to be conventional in its very 
indecorum, to be ironic, indirect, parabolical. It admired the 
Dutch painters, it had dabbled in the occult, it was Voltairian 
enough ; but it had never dared to outvie Teniers and Steen as 
in The Jolly Beggars, to blend naturalism and diablerie with the 
overwhelming verve of Tarn o' Shanter, to change the jejune free- 
thinking of two generations into an outspoken and particular 
attack on personal hypocrisy in religion as in Holy Willie's Prayer 
and The Holy Fair. Even to Scotsmen, we may suspect (or rather 
we pretty well know, from the way in which Robertson and Blair, 
Hume and Mackenzie, write), this burst of genial racy humour from 
c 



THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



the terra /Hi us of Kilmarnock must have been somewhat startling ; 
and it speaks volumes for the amiable author of the Man of 
Feeling that, in the very periodical where he was wont to air 
his mild Addisonian hobbies, he should have warmly com- 
mended the Ayrshire ploughman. 

In a period where we have so many great or almost great 
names to notice, it cannot be necessary to give the weakest 
writers of its weakest part more than that summary mention which 
is at once necessary and sufficient to complete the picture of the 
literary movement of the time. And this is more especially the 
case with reference to the minor verse of the end of the eighteenth 
century. The earliest work of the really great men who re-created 
English poetry, though in some cases chronologically in, is not in 
the least of it. For the rest, it would be almost enough to say that 
William Hayley, the preface to whose Triumphs of Temper is dated 
January 1781, and therefore synchronised very closely with the 
literary appearance of Cowper, Crabbe, and Blake, was one of the 
most conspicuous, and remains one of the most characteristic of 
them. Hayley's personal relations with the first and last of these 
poets — relations which have kept and will keep his name in some 
measure alive long after the natural death of his verse — were in 
both cases conditioned by circumstances in a rather trying way, 
but were not otherwise than creditable to him. His verse itself 
is impossible and intolerable to any but the student of literary 
history, who knows that all things are possible, and finds the reali- 
sation of all in its measure interesting. The heights, or at least 
the average levels, of Hayley may be fairly taken from the following 

quotation : — 

Her lips involuntary catch the chime 
And half articulate the soothing rhyme ; 
Till weary thought no longer watch can keep, 
But sinks reluctant in the folds of sleep — 

of which it can only be said that any schoolboy could write it ; 
his not infrequent depths from the couplet : — 

Her airy guard prepares the softest down 
From Peace's wing to line the nuptial crown. 



i MINOR POETS — HAYLEY 19 

where the image of a guardian angel holding Peace with the 
firmness of an Irish housewife, and plucking her steadily in order 
to line a nuptial crown (which must have been a sort of sun- 
bonnet) with the down thereof, will probably be admitted to be 
not easily surpassable. Of Hayley's companions in song, I have 
been dispensed by my predecessor from troubling myself with 
Erasmus Darwin, who was perhaps intellectually the ablest of 
them, though the extreme absurdity of the scheme of his Botanic 
Garden brought him, as the representative of the whole school, 
under the lash of the Anti-Jacobin in never-dying lines. Darwin's 
friend and townswoman, Anna Seward ; Mrs. Barbauld, the 
author of the noble lines, " Life, we've been long together " — the 
nobility of which is rather in its sentiment than in its expression — 
and of much tame and unimportant stuff; Merry, who called 
himself Delia Crusca and gathered round him the school of 
gosling imitators that drew on itself the lash of Gifford ; the 
Laureate Pye ; and others who, less fortunate than the victims of 
Canning and Frere, have suffered a second death in the forgetting 
of the very satires in which they met their deserts, can be barely 
named now. Two, however, may claim, if no great performance, a 
remarkable influence on great performers. Dr. Sayers, a member 
of the interesting Norwich school, directly affected Southey, and 
not Southey only, by his unrhymed verse ; while the sonnets of 
William Lisle Bowles, now only to be read with a mild esteem by 
the friendliest critic most conscious of the historic allowance, 
roused Coleridge to the wildest enthusiasm and did much to 
form his poetic taste. To Bowles, and perhaps to one or two 
others, we may find occasion to return hereafter. 

The satires, however, which have been more than once 
referred to in the preceding paragraph, form a most important 
feature, and a perhaps almost more important symptom, of the 
literary state of the time. They show, indeed, that its weakness 
did not escape the notice of contemporaries; but they also show 
that the very contemporaries who noticed it had nothing better to 
give in the way of poetry proper than that which they satirised. 



20 THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY chap. 

In fact, one of the chief of these satirists, Wolcot, has left a 
considerable mass of not definitely satirical work which is little 
if at all better than the productions of the authors he lampooned. 

This very remarkable body of satirical verse, which extends 
from the Rolliad and the early satires of Peter Pindar at the 
extreme beginning of our present time to the Pursuits of Litera- 
ture and the Anti-Jacobin towards its close, was partly literary and 
partly political, diverging indeed into other subjects, but keeping 
chiefly to these two and intermixing them rather inextricably. 
The Pursuits of Literature, though mainly devoted to the subject 
of its title, is also to a great extent political ; the Rolliad and 
the Probationary Odes, intensely political, were also to no small 
extent literary. The chief examples were among the most popular 
literary productions of the time ; and though few of them except 
the selected Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin are now read, almost all 
the major productions deserve reading. The great defect of 
contemporary satire — that it becomes by mere lapse of time unin- 
telligible — ■ is obviated to no small extent here by the crotchet 
(rather fortunate, though sometimes a little tedious) which these 
writers, almost without exception, had for elaborate annotation. 
Of the chief of them, already indicated more than once by 
reference or allusion, some account may be given. 

The Rolliad is the name generally given for shortness to a 
collection of political satires originating in the great Westminster 
election of 1784, when Fox was the Whig candidate. It de- 
rived its name from a Devonshire squire, Mr. Rolle, who was a 
great supporter of Pitt ; and, with the Political Eclogues, the mock 
Probationary Odes for the laureateship (vacant by Whitehead's 
death), and the Political Afiscellanies, which closed the series, was 
directed against the young Prime Minister and his adherents by a 
knot of members of Brooks' Club, who are identified rather by 
tradition and assertion than by positive evidence. Sheridan, Tier- 
ney, Burgoyne, Lord John Townshend, Burke's brother Richard, 
and other public men probably or certainly contributed, as did 
Ellis — afterwards to figure so conspicuously in the same way on 



THE ROLLI AD — PETER PINDAR 



the other side. But the chief writers were a certain Dr. Law- 
rence, a great friend of Burke, who was in a way the editor ; 
Tickel, a descendant of Addison's friend and a connection of the 
Sheridans ; and another Irishman named Fitzpatrick. The various 
"skits" of which the book or series is composed show considerable 
literary skill, and there is a non-political and extraneous interest 
in the fact that it contains some rondeaux believed to be the only, 
or almost the only, examples of that form written in England 
between Cotton in the seventeenth century and the revival of it 
not very many years ago. The fun is often very good fun, and 
there is a lightness and brightness about the verse and phrasing 
which had been little seen in English since Prior. But the tone 
is purely personal ; there are no principles at stake, and the book, 
besides being pretty coarse in tone, is a sort of object lesson in 
the merely intriguing style of politics which had become character- 
istic of England under the great seventy years' reign of the 
Whigs. 

Coarseness and personality, however, are in the Rolliad refined 
and high-minded in comparison with the work of " Peter Pindar," 
which has the redeeming merit of being even funnier, with the 
defect of being much more voluminous and unequal. John 
Wolcot was a Devonshire man, born in May 1738 at Kingsbridge, 
or rather its suburb Dodbrooke, in Devonshire. He was educated 
as a physician, and after practising some time at home was taken 
by Sir William Trelawney to Jamaica. Here he took orders and 
received a benefice ; but when he returned to England after Tre- 
lawney's death he practically unfrocked himself and resumed the 
cure of bodies. Although he had dabbled both in letters and in 
art, it was not till 1782 that he made any name; and he did it 
then by the rather unexpected way of writing poetical satires 
in the form of letters to the members of the infant Royal 
Academy. From this he glided into satire of the political kind, 
which, however, though he was a strong Whig and something 
more, did not so much devote itself to the attack or support of 
either of the great parties as to personal lampoons on the king, 



22 THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY chap. 

his family, and his friends. Neither Charles the Second at the 
hands of Marvell, nor George the Fourth at the hands of Moore, 
received anything like the steady fire of lampoon which Wolcot 
for years poured upon the most harmless and respectable of 
English monarchs. George the Third had indeed no vices, — 
unless a certain parsimony may be dignified by that name, — but 
he had many foibles of the kind that is more useful to the satirist 
than even vice. Wolcot's extreme coarseness, his triviality of 
subject, and a vulgarity of thought which is quite a different 
thing from either, are undeniable. But The Lousiad (a perfect 
triumph of cleverness expended on what the Greeks called rhyparo- 
graphy), the famous pieces on George and the Apple Dumplings 
and on the King's visit to Whitbread's Brewery, with scores of 
other things of the same kind (the best of all, perhaps, being the 
record of the Devonshire Progress), exhibit incredible felicity and 
fertility in the lower kinds of satire. This satire Wolcot could 
apply with remarkable width of range. His artistic satires (and 
it must be admitted that he had not bad taste here) have been 
noticed. He riddled the new devotion to physical science in 
the unlucky person of Sir Joseph Banks ; the chief of his literary 
lampoons, a thing which is quite a masterpiece in its way, is his 
"Bozzy and Piozzi," wherein Boswell and Mrs. Thrale are made 
to string in amcebean fashion the most absurd or the most 
laughable of their respective reminiscences of Johnson into verses 
which, for lightness and liveliness of burlesque representation, 
have hardly a superior. Until the severe legislation which followed 
the Jacobin terror in France cowed him, and to some extent even 
subsequently, Wolcot maintained a sort of Ishmaelite attitude, by 
turns attacking and defending himself against men of eminence in 
literature and politics, after a fashion the savagery whereof was 
excused sometimes by its courage and nearly always by an exu- 
berant good-humour which both here and elsewhere accompanies 
very distinct ill-nature. His literary life in London covered 
about a quarter of a century, after which, losing his sight, he 
retired once more to the West, though he is said to have died at 



THE ANTI-JACOBIN 23 



Somers Town in 1819. The best edition of his works is in five 
good-sized volumes, but it is known not to be complete. 

Both the Rolliad men and Wolcot had been on the Whig, 
Wolcot almost on the Republican side ; and for some years they 
had met with no sufficient adversaries, though Gifford soon engaged 
"Peter" on fairly equal terms. The great revulsion of feeling, 
however, which the acts of the French Revolution induced among 
Englishmen generally drew on a signal rally on the Tory part. 
The Anti-Jacobin newspaper, with Gifford as its editor, and 
Canning, Ellis (now a convert), and Frere as its chief contributors, 
not merely had at its back the national sentiment and the official 
power, but far outstripped in literary vigour and brilliancy the 
achievements of the other side. The famous collection above 
referred to, The Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin, which has been again 
and again reprinted, shows no signs of losing its attraction, — a 
thing almost unparalleled in the case of satirical work nearly a 
century old. Its very familiarity makes it unnecessary to dwell 
much on it, but it is safe to say that nothing of the kind more 
brilliant has ever been written, or is very likely ever to be written, 
than the parodies of Southey's Sapphics and " Henry Martin " 
sonnet, the litany of the Jacobins, French and English, the 
"skits" on Payne Knight and Darwin, The Rovers, — mocking 
the new German sentimentalism and medisevalism, — and the 
stately satire of " The New Morality," — where, almost alone, the 
writers become serious, and reach a height not attained since 
Dryden. 

Gifford and Mathias differ from the others just mentioned in 
being less directly political in writing and inspiration, though 
Gifford at least was a strong politician. He was, like Wolcot, a 
Devonshire man, born at Ashburton in 1757, and, as his numerous 
enemies and victims took care often to remind him, of extremely 
humble birth and early breeding, having been a shoemaker's 
apprentice. Attracting attention as a clever boy, he was sent to 
Exeter College and soon attained to influential patronage. To do 
him justice, however, he made his reputation by the work of his 



24 THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY chap. 

own hand, — his satires of The Baviad, 1 794, and The Mceviad 
next year, attacking and pretty nearly extinguishing Merry and his 
Delia Cruscans, a set of minor bards and mutual admirers who 
had infested the magazines and the libraries for some years. 1 The 
Anti-Jacobin and the editing of divers English classics put Gifford 
still higher ; and when the Quarterly Review was established in 
opposition to the Edinburgh, his appointment (1809) to the edi- 
torship, which he held almost till his death (he gave it up in 1824 
and died in 1826), completed his literary position. Gifford is 
little read nowadays, and a name which was not a very popular 
one even on his own side during his lifetime has, since the triumph 
of the politics and of some of the literary styles which he opposed, 
become almost a byword for savage and unfair criticism. The 
penalty of unfairness is usually and rightly paid in kind, and 
Gifford has paid it very amply. The struggles of his youth and 
lifelong ill-health no doubt aggravated a disposition at no time 
very sweet ; and the feuds of the day, both literary and political, 
were apt to be waged, even by men far superior to Gifford in early 
and natural advantages, with the extremest asperity and without 
too much scruple. But Gifford is perhaps our capital example in 
English of a cast of mind which is popularly identified with that 
of the critic, though in truth nothing is more fatal to the attain- 
ment of the highest critical competence. It was apparently im- 
possible for him (as it has been, and, it would seem, is for others, 
to regard the author whom he was criticising, the editor who had 
preceded him in his labours, or the adversary with whom he was 
carrying on a polemic, as anything but a being partly idiotic and 
partly villainous, who must be soundly scolded, first for having 

1 Although The Baviad and The Mceviad are well worth reading, it may be 
questioned whether they are as amusing as their chief quarry, The British Album, 
" containing the poems of Delia Crusca, Anna Matilda, Benedict, Cesario, The 
Bard, etc.," the two little volumes of which attained their third edition in 1790. 
" Delia Crusca," or Robert Merry (1755-98), was a gentleman by birth, and of 
means, with a Harrow and Oxford training, and some service in the army. 
Strange to say, there is testimony of good wits that he was by no means a fool ; 
yet such drivelling rubbish as he and his coadjutors wrote even the present day 
has hardly seen. 



i GIFFORD — MATHIAS 25 

done what he did, and secondly to prevent him from doing it 
again. So ingrained was this habit in Gifford that he could 
refrain from indulging it, neither in editing the essays of his most 
distinguished contributors, nor in commenting on the work of these 
contributors, outside the periodicals which he directed. Yet he 
was a really useful influence in more ways than one. The service 
that he did in forcibly suppressing the Delia Cruscan nuisance is 
even yet admitted, and there has been plentiful occasion, not 
always taken, for similar literary dragonnades since. And his work 
as an editor of English classics was, blemishes of manner and 
temper excepted, in the main very good work. 

Thomas James Mathias, the author of The Pursuits of Litei-- 
ature, was a much nearer approach to the pedant pure and 
simple. For he did not, like Gifford, redeem his rather indiscrimi- 
nate attacks on contemporaries by a sincere and intelligent devo- 
tion to older work ; and he was, much more than Gifford, ostenta- 
tious of such learning as he possessed. Accordingly the immense 
popularity of his only book of moment is a most remarkable sign 
of the times. De Quincey, who had seen its rise and its fall, 
declares that for a certain time, and not a very short one, at the 
end of the last century and the beginning of this, The Pursuits of 
Literature was the most popular book of its own day, and as 
popular as any which had appeared since ; and that there is not 
very much hyperbole in this is proved by its numerous editions, 
and by the constant references to it in the books of the time. 
Colman, who was one of Mathias' victims, declared that the verse 
was a " peg to hang the notes on "; and the habit above referred 
to certainly justified the gibe to no small extent. If the book is 
rather hard reading nowadays (and it is certainly rather difficult 
to recognise in it even the " demon of originality " which De 
Quincey himself grants rather grudgingly as an offset to its defects 
of taste and scholarship), it is perhaps chiefly obscured by the 
extreme desultoriness of the author's attacks and the absence of 
any consistent and persistent target. Much that Mathias repre- 
hends in Godwin and Priestley, in Colman and Wolcot, and a 



26 THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY chap. 

whole crowd of lesser men, is justifiably censured ; much that he 
lays down is sound and good enough. But the whole — which, 
after the wont of the time, consists of several pieces jointed on to 
each other and all flooded with notes — suffers from the twin vices 
of negation and divagation. Indeed, its chief value is that, both 
by its composition and its reception, it shows the general sense 
that literature was not in a healthy state, and that some renais- 
sance, some reaction, was necessary. 

The prominence of the French Revolution, which has already 
appeared more than once in the above account of late eighteenth 
century poetry, is still more strongly reflected in the prose 
writing of the period. Indeed, many of its principal writers 
devoted their chief attention either to describing, to attacking, or 
to defending the events and principles of this portentous phenom- 
enon. The chief of them were John Moore, Arthur Young, Helen 
Maria Williams, Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Richard Price, 
Mary Wollstonecraft, and Thomas Holcroft. Of these Price, a 
veteran who had nearly reached his sixtieth year when our period 
commences, chiefly belongs to literature as an antagonist of 
Burke, as does Priestley, whose writing was very extensive, but 
who was as much more a " natural philosopher " than a man of 
letters as Price was much less a man of letters than a moralist and 
a statistician. Both, moreover, have been mentioned in the pre- 
ceding volume, and it is not necessary to say much about them, or 
about John Home Tooke (i 736-1812), philologist and firebrand. 

Of the others something may, and in some cases not a little 
must, appear. Dr. John Moore, sometimes called " Zeluco " 
Moore (from his most popular book), and father of the general 
who fell at Corunna, was born at Stirling in the winter of 1729-30. 
Studying medicine at Glasgow, he was apprenticed (as Smollett 
had been earlier) to Dr. John Gordon, and entered the army as 
surgeon's mate for the Laufeldt campaign. He then lived two 
years in Paris, perfecting himself in medicine, after which he 
established himself in Glasgow. After many years' practice there, 
he accompanied the young Duke of Hamilton on various travels 



JOHN MOORE 27 



through Europe, and in 177S settled in London. This was his 
headquarters for the rest of his life, till his death at Richmond on 
21st January 1803. The chief interruption to his residence there 
was his memorable journey with Lord Lauderdale to Paris in the 
latter half of 1792, which resulted in one of the most vivid and 
trustworthy accounts by an eyewitness of the opening scenes of 
the Terror. This Journal during a Residence in France was pub- 
lished during the next two years. But Moore had earlier than 
this, though not very early in his own life, become an author. 
His View of Society and Manners in France, Switzerland, and 
Germany, the result of his journeyings with the Duke, appeared in 
1779, with a continuation relating to Italy two years later; and in 
1786 he published his one famous novel Zcluco. After the 
Journal he returned to novel writing in Edward (1796) and 
Mordaunt (1800) — books by no means contemptible, but suffering 
from the want of a central interest and of a more universal grasp 
of character and manners. He contributed a Life of Smollett 
and an Essay on Romance to an edition of his friend's works in 
1797. One or two medical books also stand to his credit, while 
he had rather unadvisedly added to his admirable Journal a. View 
of tiie Causes of the French Revolution which is not worthy of it. 
His complete works fill seven volumes. 

Of these, the earlier travels are readable enough, and sometimes 
very noteworthy in matter. It is almost enough to say that they 
contain some of the latest accounts by an Englishman of France 
while it was still merry, and of Venice while it was still indepen- 
dent ; an early picture of Alpine travel ; very interesting personal 
sketches of Voltaire and Frederick the Great ; and one memorable 
passage (remembered and borrowed by Scott in Redgauntlet) tell- 
ing how at Florence the shadow of Prince Charlie, passing the 
Duke of Hamilton in the public walks, fixed his eyes earnestly 
on the Duke, as though saying, " Our ancestors were better ac- 
quainted." Zeluco and the Journal alone deserve much attention 
from any one but a professed student of literature. The value of 
the latter has be-en admitted by all competent authorities, and 



28 THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY chap. 

it is enhanced by the fact that Moore was a strong Whig, and was 
even accused by some zealots of favouring Jacobinism. His pict- 
ure, therefore, of the way in which political revolution glides into 
ethical anarchy is certainly unbiassed the other way. Of Zeluco 
everybody, without perhaps a very clear knowledge of its author- 
ship, knows one passage — the extremely humorous letter contain- 
ing the John Bull contempt of the sailor Dawson for the foolish 
nation which clothes its troops in " white, which is absurd, and 
blue, which is only fit for the artillery and the blue horse." But few 
know much more, though there is close by a much more elaborate 
and equally good piece of Smollettian fun in the quarrel of Bu- 
chanan and Targe, the Scotch Whig and Jacobite, over the reputa- 
tion of Queen Mary. The book, however, besides the unlucky 
drawback that almost all its interest lies in the latter part, has for 
hero a sort of lifeless monster of wickedness, who is quite as unin- 
teresting as a faultless one, and shows little veracity of character 
except in the minor personages and episodes. In these, and indeed 
throughout Moore's work, there is a curious mixture of convention 
with extreme shrewdness, of somewhat commonplace expression 
with a remarkably pregnant and humorous conception. But he 
lacks concentration and finish, and is therefore never likely to be 
much read again as a whole. 

There may appear to be some slight inconsistency is giving a 
paragraph, if only a short one, to Arthur Young where distinct 
mention has been refused to Price and Priestley. But Olivier de 
Serres has secured a place in all histories of French literature as 
a representative of agricultural writing, and Young is our English 
Serres. Moreover, his Survey of France has permanent attraction 
for its picture of the state of that country just before, and in the 
earliest days of, the Revolution. And though his writing is 
extremely incorrect and unequal, though its literary effect is 
much injured by the insertion of statistical details which some- 
times turn it for pages together into a mere set of tables, he has 
constant racy phrases, some of which have passed into the most hon- 
ourable state of all — that of unidentified quotation — while more 



i HELEN MARIA WILLIAMS 29 

deserve it. He was born in 1741, the son of a Suffolk clergy- 
man, was connected by marriage with the Burneys, and very 
early developed the passion for agricultural theory and practice 
which marked his whole life, even when in his later years (he 
lived till 1820) he fell under the influence of religious crotchets. 
His French travels were published in 1792-94, and form by far his 
most attractive book, though his surveys of England and Ireland 
contain much that is good. Young was a keen, though not a 
very consistent or clear-sighted politician, especially on the side of 
political economy. But, like other men of his time, he soon fell 
away from his first love for the French Revolution. In the 
literary, historical, and antiquarian associations of the places he 
visited, he seems to have felt no interest whatever. 

Helen Maria Williams, with Young and Moore, is our chief 
English witness for the state of France and Paris just before and 
during the early years of the Revolution. She was one of 
Johnson's girl pets in his latest years, but Boswell is certainly 
justified in suggesting that if the sage had lived a little longer he 
would certainly not have repeated his elegant compliment : " If 
I am so ill when you are near, what should I be when you are 
away?" She outlived this phase also of her life, and did not 
die till 1828, being then sixty-five. Even in the early days she 
had been a Girondist, not a Jacobin ; but she happened to live in 
Paris during the outbreak of the Revolution, wrote Letters from 
France, which had a great popularity, and was hand in glove with 
most of the English and Irish revolutionary leaders. Wolfe 
Tone in his diary speaks of her as " Miss Jane Bull completely," 
but neither prudery nor patriotism would have struck persons less 
prejudiced than the leader of the United Irishmen as the leading 
points of Helen Maria. Her poems, published in 1 786, during 
her pre-revolutionary days, are dedicated to Queen Charlotte, and 
nearly half the first of the two pretty little volumes (which have a 
horrific frontispiece of the Princes in the Tower, by Maria 
Cosway) is occupied by a stately list of subscribers, with the 
Prince of Wales at their head. They have little merit, but are 



30 THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY chap. 

not uninteresting for their " signs of the times " : sonnets, a tale 
called Edwin and Eltruda, an address to Sensibility, and so forth. 
But the longest, Peru, is in the full eighteenth century couplet 
with no sign of innovation. The Letters from France, which 
extend to eight volumes, possess, besides the interest of their 
subject, the advantage of a more than fair proficiency on the 
author's part in the formal but not ungraceful prose of her time, 
neither unduly Johnsonian nor in any way slipshod. But it may 
perhaps be conceded that, but for the interest of the subject, they 
would not be of much importance. 

The most distinguished members of the Jacobin school, from 
the literary point of view, were Thomas Paine and William 
Godwin. Paine was only a literary man by accident. He was 
born at Thetford on 29th January 1 737, in the rank of small trades- 
man, and subsequently became a custom-house officer. But he 
lost his place for debt and dubious conduct in 1774, and found 
a more congenial home in America, where he defended the 
rebellion of the Colonies in a pamphlet entitled Common Sense. 
His new compatriots rewarded him pretty handsomely, and after 
about a dozen years he returned to Europe, visiting England, 
which, however, he left again very shortly (it is said owing to 
the persuasion of Blake), just in time to escape arrest. He had 
already made friends in France, and his publication of The 
Rights of Man (1791-92), in answer to Burke's attack on the 
Revolution, made him enormously popular in that country. He 
was made a French citizen, and elected by the Pas de Calais to 
the Convention. His part here was not discreditable. He 
opposed the King's execution, and, being expelled the Convention 
and imprisoned by the Jacobins, wrote his other notorious work, 
The Age of Reason (1794-95), in which he maintained the Deist 
position against both Atheism and Christianity. He recovered 
his liberty and his seat, and was rather a favourite with Napoleon. 
In 1802 he went back to America, and died there (a confirmed 
drunkard it is said and denied) seven years later. A few 
years later still, Cobbett, in one of his sillier moods, brought 



PAINE 



31 



Paine's bones back to England, which did not in the least want 
them. 

The coarse and violent expression, as well as the unpopular 
matter, of Paine's works may have led to his being rather unfairly 
treated in the hot fights of the Revolutionary period ; but the 
attempts which have recently been made to whitewash him are a 
mere mistake of reaction, or paradox, or pure stupidity. The 
charges which used to be brought against his moral character 
matter little ; for neither side in these days had, or in any days 
has, a monopoly of loose or of holy living. But two facts will 
always remain : first, that Paine attacked subjects which all require 
calm, and some of them reverent, treatment, in a tone of the 
coarsest violence ; and, secondly, that he engaged in questions of 
the widest reach, and requiring endless thought and reading, with 
the scanty equipments and the superabundant confidence of a 
self-educated man. No better instance of this latter characteristic 
could be produced or required than a sentence in the preface 
to the second part of the Age of Reason. Here Paine (who 
admitted that he had written the first part hastily, in expectation 
of imprisonment, without a library, and without so much as a copy 
of the Scriptures he was attacking at hand, and who further con- 
fessed that he knew neither Hebrew nor Greek nor even Latin) 
observes : " I have produced a work that no Bible-believer, though 
writing at his ease and with a library of Church books about him, 
can refute." In this charming self-satisfaction, which only natural 
temper assisted by sufficient ignorance can attain in perfection, 
Paine strongly resembles his disciple Cobbett. But the two were 
also alike in the effect which this undoubting dogmatism, joined 
to a very clear, simple, and forcible style, less correct in Paine's 
case than in Cobbett's, produced upon readers even more ignorant 
than themselves, and greatly their inferiors in mental strength and 
literary skill. Paine, indeed, was as much superior to Cobbett in 
logical faculty as he was his inferior in range of attainments and 
charm of style ; while his ignorance and his arbitrary assumption 
and exclusion of premises passed unnoticed by the classes whom 



32 THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



he more particularly addressed. He was thus among the lower 
and lower middle classes by far the most formidable propagator 
of anarchist ideas in religion and politics that England produced ; 
and his influence lasted till far into the present century, being, it 
is said, only superseded by new forms of a similar spirit. But he 
never could have had much on persons of education, unless they 
were prepared to sympathise with him, or were of singularly weak 
mind. 

William Godwin, on the other hand, affected the " educated 
persons," and those of more or less intellectual power, even more 
forcibly than Paine affected the vulgar. This influence of his, 
indeed, is a thing almost unique, and it has perhaps never yet 
been succinctly examined and appraised. Born at Wisbech in 
1756, the son of a dissenting minister, he himself was thoroughly 
educated for the Presbyterian ministry, and for some five years 
discharged its functions. Then in 1783 (again the critical period) 
he became unorthodox in theology, and took to literature, addict- 
ing himself to Whig politics. He also did a certain amount of 
tutoring. It was not, however, till nearly ten years after he had 
first taken to writing that he made his mark, and attained the 
influence above referred to by a series of works rather remarkably 
different in character. 1 793 saw the famous Inquiry concerning 
Political Justice, which for a time carried away many of the best 
and brightest of the youth of England. Next year came the 
equally famous and more long-lived novel of Caleb Williams, and 
an extensive criticism (now much forgotten, but at the time of 
almost equal importance with these), published in the Morning 
Chronicle, of the charge of Lord Chief- Justice Eyre in the trial of 
Home Tooke, Holcroft, and others for high treason. Godwin 
himself ran some risk of prosecution ; and that he was left un- 
molested shows that the Pitt government did not strain its powers, 
as is sometimes alleged. In 1797 he published The Enquirer, a 
collection of essays on many different subjects; and in 1799 his 
second remarkable novel (it should be said that in his early years 
of struggle he had written others which are quite forgotten) 



i GODWIN 33 

St. Leon. The closing years of the period also saw first his 
connection and then his marriage with Mary Wollstonecraft, who 
will be noticed immediately after him. 

It is rather curious that Godwin, who was but forty-four at the 
beginning of the nineteenth century, and continued to be a diligent 
writer as well as a publisher and bookseller till his death in 1836, 
his last years being made comfortable by a place under the Re- 
form Ministry, never did anything really good after the eigh- 
teenth century had closed. His tragedy Antonio only deserves 
remembrance because of Lamb's exquisite account of its damna- 
tion. His Life of Chaucer (1801) was one of the earliest ex- 
amples of that style of padding and guesswork in literary biography 
with which literature has been flooded since. His later novels 
— Fleetwood, Mandeville, Cloudesley, etc. — are far inferior to Caleb 
Williams (1 794) and St. Leon (1 799). His Treatise of Population 
(1820), in answer to Malthus, was belated and ineffective; and 
his History of the Commonwealth, in four volumes, though a very 
respectable compilation, is nothing more. Godwin's character was 
peculiar, and cannot be said to be pleasing. Though regarded 
(or at least described) by his enemies as an apostle of license, he 
seems to have been a rather cold-blooded person, whose one 
passion for Mary Wollstonecraft was at least as much an affair 
of the head as of the heart. He was decidedly vain, and as 
decidedly priggish ; but the worst thing about him was his ten- 
dency to " sponge " — a tendency which he indulged not merely 
on his generous son-in-law Shelley, but on almost everybody with 
whom he came in contact. It is, however, fair to admit that 
this tendency (which was probably a legacy of the patronage 
system) was very wide-spread at the time ; that the mighty genius 
of Coleridge succumbed to it to a worse extent even than Godwin 
did ; and that Southey himself, who for general uprightness and 
independence has no superior in literary history, was content for 
years to live upon the liberality not merely of an uncle, but of a 
school comrade, in a way which in our own days would probably 
make men of not half his moral worth seriously uncomfortable. 



34 THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY chap. 

Estimates of the strictly formal excellence of Godwin's writing 
have differed rather remarkably. To take two only, his most 
recent biographer, Mr. Kegan Paul, is never weary of praising the 
" beauty " of Godwin's style ; while Scott, a very competent and 
certainly not a very savage critic, speaks of the style of the 
Chaucer as " uncommonly depraved, exhibiting the opposite de- 
fects of meanness and of bombast." This last is too severe ; but 
I am unable often to see the great beauty, the charm, and so forth, 
which Godwin's admirers have found in his writings. He shows 
perhaps at his best in this respect in St. Leon, where there are 
some passages of a rather artificial, but solemn and grandiose 
beauty ; and he can seldom be refused the praise of a capable and 
easily wielded fashion of writing, equally adapted to exposition, 
description, and argument. But that Godwin's taste and style were 
by no means impeccable is proved by his elaborate essay on the 
subject in the Enquirer, where he endeavours to show that the 
progress of English prose-writing had been one of unbroken im- 
provement since the time of Queen Elizabeth, and pours contempt 
on passages of Shakespeare and others where more catholic 
appreciation could not fail to see the beauty. In practice his 
special characteristic, which Scott (or Jeffrey, for the criticism 
appeared in the Edinburgh) selected for special reprobation in the 
context of the passage quoted above, was the accumulation of 
short sentences, very much in the manner of which, in the two 
generations since his death, Macaulay and the late Mr. J. R. 
Green have been the chief exponents. Hazlitt probably learnt 
this from Godwin ; and I think there is no doubt that Macaulay 
learnt it from Hazlitt. 

It may, however, be freely admitted that whatever Godwin had 
to say was at least likely not to be prejudicially affected by the 
manner in which he said it. And he had, as we have seen, a great 
deal to say in a great many kinds. The " New Philosophy," as it 
was called, of the Political Jus/ice was to a great extent softened, 
if not positively retracted, in subsequent editions and publications ; 
but its quality as first set forth accounts both for the conquest 



GODWIN 



35 



which it, temporarily at least, obtained over such minds as those 
of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and for the horror with which it was 
regarded elsewhere. Godwin's system was not too consistent, and 
many of its parts were borrowed more or less directly from others : 
from Locke, from Hume, from the French materialists, from 
Jonathan Edwards, and, by way of reaction as well as imitation, 
from Rousseau. But Godwin's distinctive claim, if not exactly 
glory, is that he was the first systematic Anarchist. His cardinal 
principle was that government in itself, and with all its conse- 
quences of law, restriction, punishment, etc., is bad, and to be got 
rid of. He combined this (logically enough) with perfectibilism 
— supposing the individual to be infinitely susceptible of" melior- 
ation" by the right use of reason — and (rather illogically) with 
necessarianism. In carrying out his views he not only did not 
hesitate at condemning religion, marriage, and all other restrictions 
of the kind, but indulged in many curious crotchets as to the 
uselessness, if not mischievousness, of gratitude and other senti- 
ments generally considered virtuous. The indefinite development 
of the individual by reason and liberty, and the general welfare of 
the community at large, were the only standards that he admitted. 
And it should be said, to his credit, that he condemned the use of 
violence and physical force against government quite as strongly 
as their use by government. The establishment of absolute liberty, 
in the confidence that it will lead to absolute happiness, was, at 
first at any rate, the main idea of the Political Justice, and it is 
easy to understand what wild work it must have made with heads 
already heated by the thunder-weather of change that was pervad- 
ing Europe. 

Godwin has been frequently charged with alarm at the 
anarchist phantom he had raised. It is certain not merely that 
he altered and softened the Political Justice not a little, but that 
in his next work of the same kind, The Enquirer, he took both 
a very different line of investigation and a different tone of 
handling. In the preface he represents it as a sort of inductive 
complement to the high a priori scheme of his former work ; but 



36 THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY chap. 

this is not a sufficient account of the matter. It is true that his 
paradoxical rebellion against conventions appears here and there ; 
and his literary criticism, which was never strong, may be typified 
by his contrast of the " hide-bound sportiveness " of Fielding with 
the "flowing and graceful hilarity" of Sterne. Indeed, this sen- 
tence takes Godwin's measure pretty finally, and shows that he 
was of his age, not for all time. But, on the other hand, it is fair 
to say that the essays on " The Study of the Classics " and the 
"Choice of Reading," dealing with subjects on which, both then 
and since, oceans of cant and nonsense have been poured forth, 
are nearly as sound as they can be. 

In his purely imaginative work he presents a contrast not much 
less strange. We may confine attention here to the two capital 
examples of it. Caleb Williams alone has survived as a book of 
popular reading, and it is no small tribute to its power that, a full 
century after its publication, it is still kept on sale in sixpenny 
editions. Yet on no novel perhaps is it so difficult to adjust 
critical judgment, either by the historical or the personal methods. 
Both its general theme — the discovery of a crime committed 
by a man of high reputation and unusual moral worth, and the 
persecution of the discoverer by the criminal — and its details, 
are thoroughly leavened and coloured by Godwin's political and 
social views at the time ; and either this or some other defect has 
made it readable with great difficulty at all times by some persons, 
among whom I am bound to enrol myself. Yet the ingenuity of 
its construction, in spite of the most glaring impossibilities, the 
striking situations it contains, and no doubt other merits, have 
always secured readers for it. St. Leon, a romance of the elixir 
vitce, has no corresponding central interest, and, save in the 
amiable but very conventional figure of the heroine Marguerite, who 
is said to have been studied from Mary Wollstonecraft, no interest 
of character ; while its defects of local colour and historical truth 
are glaring. But Godwin, who was in so many ways a mirror of 
the new thought of the time, had caught by anticipation something 
of its nascent spirit of romance. He is altogether a rather puzzling 



i MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT 37 

person ; and perhaps the truest explanation of the puzzle, as well 
as certainly the most comfortable to the critic, is that his genius 
and literary temperament were emphatically crude and undevel- 
oped, that he was a prophet rather than anything else, and that he 
had the incoherencies and the inconsistencies almost inseparable 
from prophecy. 

Even if fate and metaphysical aid had not conjoined Godwin 
and Mary Wollstonecraft in the closest bond possible between 
man and woman, it would have been proper to mention their names 
together as authors. For as Godwin's " New Philosophy " was the 
boldest attempt made by any man of the time in print to overthrow 
received conventions of the relations of man to man, and inciden- 
tally of man to woman, so was his wife's Vindication of the Rights 
of Woman a complement of it in relation to the status of the 
other sex as such. She was rather hardly treated in her own time ; 
Horace Walpole calling her, it is said (I have not verified the 
quotation), a " hyena in petticoats " : it would be at least as just to 
call Lord Orford a baboon in breeches. And though of late years 
she has been made something of a heroine, it is to be feared that 
admiration has been directed rather to her crotchets than to her 
character. This last appears to have been as lovable as her hap 
was ill. The daughter of an Irishman of means, who squandered 
them and became a burden on his children ; the sister of an 
attorney who was selfishly indifferent to his sisters — she had to fend 
for herself almost entirely. At one time she and her sisters kept 
school ; then she was, thanks to the recommendation of Mr. Prior, 
a master at Eton, introduced as governess to the family of Lord 
Kingsborough ; then, after doing hack-work for Johnson, the chief 
Liberal publisher of the period, she went to Paris, and unluckily 
fell in with a handsome scoundrel, Gilbert Imlay, an American 
soldier. She lived with him, he deserted her, and she nearly 
committed the suicide which was actually the fate of her unfortu- 
nate daughter by him, Fanny Imlay or Godwin. Only at the last had 
she a glimpse of happiness. Godwin, who had some weaknesses, 
but who was not a scoundrel, met her, and fell in love with her, 



38 THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY chap. 

and as both had independently demonstrated that marriage was a 
failure, they naturally married ; but she died a week, after giving 
birth to a daughter — the future Mrs. Shelley. The Vindication of 
the Rights of Woman, on which Mary Wollstonecraft's fame as an 
author almost wholly rests, is in some ways a book nearly as faulty 
as it can be. It is not well written ; it is full of prejudices quite 
as wrong-headed as those it combats ; it shows very little knowl- 
edge either of human nature or of good society ; and its " niceness," 
to use the word in what was then its proper sense, often goes near 
to the nasty. But its protest on the one hand against the " proper " 
sentimentality of such English guides of female youth as Drs. 
Fordyce and Gregory, on the other against the " improper " senti- 
mentality of Rousseau, is genuine and generous. Many of its 
positions and contentions may be accepted unhesitatingly to-day by 
those who are by no means enamoured of advanced womanhood ; 
and Mary, as contrasted with most of her rights-of-women followers, 
is curiously free from bumptiousness and the general qualities of 
the virago. She had but ill luck in life, and perhaps showed no 
very good judgment in letters, but she had neither bad brains nor 
bad blood; and the references to her, long after her death, by 
such men as Southey, show the charm which she exercised. 

With Godwin also is very commonly connected Thomas 
Holcroft (or, as Lamb always preferred to spell the name, 
"Ouldcxoit "), a curiosity of literature and a rather typical 
figure of the time. Holcroft was born in London in December 
1745, quite in the lowest ranks, and himself rose from being 
stable-boy at Newmarket, through the generally democratic trade 
of shoemaking, to quasi-literary positions as schoolmaster and 
clerk, and then to the dignity of actor. He was about thirty- 
five when he first began regular authorship ; and during the rest 
of his life he wrote four novels, some score and a half of plays, 
and divers other works, none of which is so good as his 
Autobiography, published after his death by Hazlitt, and said to 
be in part that writer's work. It would have been fortunate for 
Holcroft if he had confined himself to literature ; for some of 



HOLCROFT 39 



his plays, notably The Road to Ruin, brought him in positively 
large sums of money, and his novels were fairly popular. But 
he was a violent democrat, — some indeed attributed to him the 
origination of most of the startling things in Godwin's Political 
Justice, — and in 1794 he was tried, though with no result, for 
high treason, with Home Tooke and others. This brought him 
into the society of the young Jacobin school, — Coleridge, and the 
rest, — but was disastrous to the success of his plays ; and when 
he went abroad in 1 799 he entered on an extraordinary business 
of buying old masters (which were rubbish) and sending them to 
England, where they generally sold for nothing. He returned, 
however, and died on 23rd March 1809. 

Holcroft's theatre will best receive such notice as it requires 
in connection with the other drama of the century. Of his 
novels, Alwyn, the first, had to do with his experiences as an 
actor, and Hugh T?-evor is also supposed to have been more or \ 
less autobiographical. Holcroft's chief novel, however, is Anna 
St. Ives, a book in no less than seven volumes, though not very 
large ones, which was published in 1792, and which exhibits no 
small affinities to Godwin's Caleb Williams, and indeed to the 
Political Justice itself. And Godwin, who was not above 
acknowledging mental obligations, if he was rather ill at dis- 
charging pecuniary ones, admits the influence which Holcroft 
had upon him. Anna St. Ives, which, like so many of the other / 
novels of its day, is in letters, is worth reading by those who can 
spare the time. But it cannot compare, for mere amusement, 
with the very remarkable Memoir above referred to. Only about 
a fourth of this is said to be in Holcroft's own words ; but 
Hazlitt has made excellent matter of the rest, and it includes a 
good deal of diary and other authentic work. In his own part 
Holcroft shows himself a master of the vernacular, as well as 
(what he undoubtedly was) a man of singular shrewdness and 
strength of mental temper. 

The Novel school of the period (to which Holcroft introduces 
us) is full and decidedly interesting, though it contains at the 



4 o THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY chap. 

best one masterpiece, Vatlick, and a large number of more or 
less meritorious attempts in false styles. The kind was very 
largely written — much more so than is generally thought. Thus 
Godwin, in his early struggling clays, and long before the complete 
success of Caleb Williams, wrote, as has been mentioned, for 
trifling sums of money (five and ten guineas), two or three novels 
which even the zeal of his enthusiastic biographer does not seem 
to have been able to recover. Nor did the circulating library, 
even then a flourishing institution, lack hands more or less eminent 
to work for it, or customers to take off its products. The Minerva 
Press, much cited but little read, had its origin in this our time ; 
and this time is entitled to the sole and single credit of starting 
and carrying far a bastard growth of fiction, the "tale of terror," 
which continued to be cultivated in its simplest form for at 
least half a century, and which can hardly be said to be quite 
obsolete yet. But as usual we must proceed by special names, 
and there is certainly no lack of them. " Zeluco " Moore has 
been dealt with already; Day, the eccentric author of Sanford 
and Merton, belongs mainly to an earlier period, and died, still a 
young man, in the year of the French Revolution ; but, besides 
i [ol< roft, Beckford, Bage, Cumberland, Mrs. Radcliffe, and Monk 
Lewis, with Mrs. Inchbald, are distinctly " illustrations " of the 
time, and must have more or less separate mention. 

William Beckford is one of the problems of English literature. 
He was one of the richest men in England, and his long life — 
1760 to 1S44 — was occupied for the most part not merely with 
the collection, but with the reading of books. That he could 
write as well as read he showed as a mere boy by his satirical 
Memoirs of Pointers, and by the great-indittle novel of Vathek 
(1783), respecting the composition of which in French or English 
divers fables are told. Then he published nothing for forty years, 
till in 1S34 and 1835 he issued his Travels in Italy, Spain, and 
Portugal, recollections of his earliest youth. These travels have 
extraordinary merits of their kind ; but Vathek is a kind almost to 
itself. The history of the Caliph, in so far as it is a satire on 



BECKFORD — BAGE 41 



unlimited power, is an eighteenth century commonplace ; while 
many traits in it are obviously imitated from Voltaire. But the 
figure of Nouronihar, which Byron perhaps would have equalled 
if he could, stands alone in literature as a fantastic projection of 
the potentiality of evil magnificence in feminine character ; and 
the closing scenes in the domain of Eblis have the grandeur of 
Blake combined with that finish which Blake's temperament, 
joined to his ignorance of literature and his lack of scholarship, 
made it impossible for him to give. The book is quite unique. 
It could hardly, in some of its weaker parts especially, have been 
written at any other time ; and yet its greater characteristics have 
nothing to do with that time. In the florid kind of supernatural 
story it has no equal. Only Dante, Beckford, and Scott in 
Wandering Willie's Tale have given us Hells that are worthy of 
the idea of Hell. 

Except that both were very much of their time, it would be 
impossible to imagine a more complete contrast than that which 
exists between Beckford and Bage. The former was, as has been 
said, one of the richest men in England, the creator of two 
"Paradises" at Fonthill and Cintra, the absolute arbiter of his 
time and his pleasures, a Member of Parliament while he chose 
to be so, a student, fierce and recluse, the husband of a daughter 
of the Gordons, and the father of a mother of the Hamiltons, 
the collector, disperser, bequeather of libraries almost unequalled 
in magnificence and choice. Robert Bage, who was born in 
1728 and died in 1801, was in some ways a typical middle-class 
Englishman. He was a papermaker, and the son of a paper- 
maker ; he was never exactly affluent nor exactly needy ; he was 
apparently a Quaker by education and a freethinker by choice ; 
and between 1781 and 1796, obliged by this reason or that to 
stain the paper which he made, he produced six novels : Mount 
Henneth, Barham Downs, The Fair Syrian, James Wallace, Man 
as he is, and Hermsprong. The first, second, and fourth of these 
were admitted by Scott to the " Ballantyne Novels," the others, 
though Hermsprong is admittedly Bage's best work, were not. 



4 ; [HE END OF nil-: EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



It is impossibl* that there is geni is in Bage ; yet he is .1 

remarkable writer, and there is noticeable in him that 

singula] tendency which has reasserted itself a century 

later. An imitator of Fielding and Smollett in general plan, — 
of the latter specially in the dangerous scheme of narrative by 
letter. — Bage added to their methods the purpose of advocating 
a looser scheme ot" morals and a more anarchical system of 
government. In other words. Bage, though a man well advanced 
ars at the date ot" the Revolution, exhibits for us distinctly 
the spirit which brought the Revolution about. He is a com- 
panion ot' Godwin and ot' Mary WoUstonecraft ; and th 
it must be admitted that, as in other cases, the presence ot' 
"• impropriety " in him by no means implies the absence ot' 
dulness, he is full ot' a eer S art ot' undeveloped and irregular 
clove; 

. most famous, though not the only novel of Richard 
iberland, Henry, shows the same tendency I loose 

from British decorum, even such decorum as had really been m 
the main served by the much-abused pens of Fielding. 
Smollett, and Sterne himself: but it has little purpose and in 
little - an] kind. Cumberland clung as close as he could 

Fielding, ig the preliminary dissertation 

or meditation, but he would be a very strange reader who should 
mistake the two, 

an d Cumberland, the former of whom 
3 s me little resemblance to his country^ 
. was, with or without luge's | aued more or 

less st« leed, it m; said to be little more t'. 

variant, wil ry sci el- writing. 

this s hich was g he period. 

ed by Horace Walpole in the 
■ 
brilliant illus s But the gen - 

. the talent of the 
ras lore e; siry imitated. How 



MRS. RADCLIFFE 43 



far the practice of the Germans (who had themselves imitated 
Walpole, and whose work began in the two last decades of the 
century to have a great reflex influence upon England) was 
responsible for the style of story which, after Mrs. Radcliffe and 
Monk Lewis had set the fashion, dominated the circulating 
libraries for years, is a question not easy and perhaps not 
necessary to answer positively. I believe myself that no foreign 
influence ever causes a change in national taste ; it merely coin- 
cides therewith. But the fact of the set in the tide is unmistak- 
able and undeniable. For some years the two authors just 
mentioned rode paramount in the affections of English novel 
readers ; before long Miss Austen devoted her early and de- 
lightful effort, Northanger Abbey, to satirising the taste for them, 
and quoted or invented a well-known list of blood-curdling titles j 1 
the morbid talent of Maturin gave a fresh impulse to it, even 
after the healthier genius of Scott had already revolutionised the 
general scheme of novel-writing ; and yet later still an industrious 
literary hack, Leitch Ritchie, was able to issue, and it may be 
presumed to find readers for, a variety of romance the titles of 
which might strike a hasty practitioner of the kind of censure 
usual in biblical criticism as a designed parody of Miss Austen's 
own catalogue. The style, indeed, in the wide sense has never 
lost favour. But in the special Radcliffian form it reigned for 
some thirty years, and was widely popular for nearly fifty. 

Anne Radcliffe, whose maiden name was Ward, was born on 
9th July 1764 and died on 7th February 1822. One of her 
novels, Gaston de Blondeville, was published posthumously ; but 
otherwise her whole literary production took place between the 
years 1789 and 1797. The first of these years saw The Castles of 
Athlin and Dunbaytie, a very immature work ; the last The Italian, 
which is perhaps the best. Between them appeared A Sicilian 
Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), and the far- 

1 I used to think these titles sprouts of the author's brain ; but a correspondent 
assured me that one or two at least are certainly genuine. Possibly, therefore, 
all are. 



44 THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY chap. 

famed Mysteries of Udolpho in 1795. Matthew Gregory Lewis, 
who, like Beckford, was a West- Indian landowner and member 
for Hindon, and was well-to-do if not extremely wealthy, was 
nine years younger than Mrs. Radcliffe, and did not produce 
his famous Monk till the same year which saw Udolpho. He 
published a good deal of other work in prose, verse, and drama ; 
the most noteworthy of the second class being Tales of Terror, 
to which Scott contributed, and the most noteworthy of the third 
The Castle Spectre. Lewis, who, despite some foibles, was 
decidedly popular in the literary and fashionable society of his 
time, died in 181 8 at the age of forty- five on his way home from 
the West Indies. Although he would have us understand that 
The Monk was written some time before its actual publication, 
Lewis' position as a direct imitator of Mrs. Radcliffe is unmis- 
takable ; and although he added to the characteristics of her 
novels a certain appeal to " Lubricity " from which she was 
completely free, the general scheme of the two writers, as well as 
that of all their school, varies hardly at all. The supernatural 
in Mrs. Radcliffe's case is mainly, if not wholly, what has been 
called " the explained supernatural," — that is to say, the ap- 
parently ghostly, and certainly ghastly, effects are usually if not 
always traced to natural causes, while in most if not all of her 
followers the demand for more highly spiced fare in the reader, 
and perhaps a defect of ingenuity in the writer, leaves the devils 
and witches as they were. In all, without exception, castles with 
secret passages, trap-doors, forests, banditti, abductions, sliding 
panels, and other apparatus and paraphernalia of the kind play 
the main part. The actual literary value is, on the whole, low ; 
though Mrs. Radcliffe is not without glimmerings, and it is ex- 
ceedingly curious to note that, just before the historical novel was 
once for all started by Scott, there is in all these writers an 
absolute and utter want of comprehension of historical propriety, 
of local and temporal colour, and of all the marks which were so 
soon to distinguish fiction. Yet at the very same time the yearn- 
ing after the historical is shown in the most unmistakable fashion 



HANNAH MORE 45 



from Godwin down to the Misses Lee, Harriet and Sophia (the 
latter of whom in 1783 produced, in The Recess, a preposterous 
Elizabethan story, which would have liked to be a historical 
novel), and other known and unknown writers. 

Another lady deserves somewhat longer notice. Hannah 
More, once a substantially famous person in literature, is now 
chiefly remembered by her association with great men of letters, 
such as Johnson in her youth, Macaulay and De Quincey in her 
old age. She was born as early as 1745 near Bristol, and all 
her life was a Somerset worthy. She began — a curious begin- 
ning for so serious a lady, but with reforming intentions — to write 
for the stage, published The Search after Happiness when she 
was seventeen, and had two rather dreary tragedies, Percy and 
the Fatal Secret, acted, Garrick being a family friend of hers. 
Becoming, as her day said, " pious," she wrote " Sacred Dramas," 
and at Cowslip Green, Barley Wood, and Clifton produced " Moral 
Essays," the once famous novel of Ccelebs in Search of a Wife, 
and many tracts, the best known of which is The Shepherd of 
Salisbury Plain. She died at a great age on 7th September 1833. 
Hannah More is not to be spoken of with contempt, except 
by ignorance or incompetence. She had real abilities, and 
was a woman of the world. But she was very unfortunately 
parted in respect of time, coming just before the days when it 
became possible for a lady to be decent in literature without being 
dull. 

If a book and not a chapter were allowed about this curious, 
and on the whole rather neglected and undervalued, Fifth Act of 
the eighteenth century, many of its minor literary phenomena 
would have to be noticed : such as the last state of periodicals 
before the uprising of the Edinburgh Review, and the local literary 
coteries, the most notable of which was that of Norwich, with the 
Aldersons, Sayers the poet, who taught Southey and others to try 
blank verse in other measures than the decasyllabic, William 
Taylor, the apostle of German literature in England, and others. 
But, as it is, we must concentrate our attention on its main lines. 



46 THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 



In these lines the poetical pioneers, the political and other 
satirists, the revolutionary propagandists, and the novelists of 
terror, are the four classes of writers that distinguish the period 
1780 to 1800 ; and perhaps they distinguish it sufficiently, at least 
for those with whom historical genesis and connection atone to some 
extent for want of the first order of intrinsic interest. In less 
characteristic classes and in isolated literary personalities the 
time was not extremely rich, though it was not quite barren. 
We can here only notice cursorily the theological controversialists 
who, like Paley, Horsley, and Watson, waged war against the fresh 
outburst of aggressive Deism coinciding with the French Re- 
volution : the scholars, such as, in their different ways, Dr. Parr, 
the Whig " moon " of Dr. Johnson ; Porson, the famous Cambridge 
Grecian, drinker, and democrat ; Taylor the Platonist, a strange 
person who translated most of the works of Plato and was said 
to have carried his discipleship to the extent of a positive Pagan- 
ism ; Gilbert Wakefield, a miscellaneous writer who wrote rapidly 
and with little judgment, but with some scholarship and even 
some touches of genius, on a great variety of subjects ; Jacob 
Bryant, mythologist, theologian, and historical critic, a man of vast 
learning but rather weak critical power ; and many others. Of 
some of these we may indeed have more to say later, as also of 
the much-abused Malthus, whose famous book, in part one of the 
consequences of Godwin, appeared in 1 798 ; while as for drama, 
we shall return to that too. Sheridan survived through the whole 
of the time and a good deal beyond it ; but his best work was 
done, and the chief dramatists of the actual day were Colman, 
Holcroft, Cumberland, and the farce-writer O'Keefe, a man of 
humour and a lively fancy. 

One, however, of these minor writers has too much of what 
has been called " the interest of origins " not to have a paragraph 
to himself. William Gilpin, who prided himself on his connection 
with Bernard Gilpin, the so-called " Apostle of the North " in the 
sixteenth century, was born at Carlisle. But he is best known 
in connection with the New Forest, where, after taking his degree 



GILPIN 



47 



at Oxford, receiving orders, and keeping a school for some time, 
he was appointed to the living of Boldre. This he held till 
his death in 1814. Gilpin was not a secularly-minded parson by 
any means ; but his literary fame is derived from the series of 
Picturesque Tours {The Highlands, 1778; The Wye and South 
Wales, 1782 ; The Lakes, 1789; Forest Scenery, 1791 ; and The 
West of England and the Isle of Wight, 1798) which he published 
in the last quarter of the century. They were extremely popular, 
they set a fashion which may be said never to have died out since, 
and they attained the seal of parody in the famous Dr. Syntax of 
William Combe (1 741-1823), an Eton and Oxford man who spent 
a fortune and then wrote an enormous amount of the most widely 
various work in verse and prose, of which little but Syntax itself 
(18 1 2 sqq.) is remembered. Gilpin himself is interesting as an 
important member of " the naturals," as they have been oddly and 
equivocally called. His style is much more florid and less just 
than Gilbert White's, and his observation correspondingly less tr,ue. 
But he had a keen sense of natural beauty and did much to instil 
it into others. 

In all the work of the time, however, great and small, from 
the half-unconscious inspiration of Burns and Blake to the 
common journey-work of book-making, we shall find the same 
character — incessantly recurring, and unmistakable afterwards if 
not always recognisable at the time — *■ of transition, of decay and 
seed-time mingled with and crossing each other. There are no 
distinct spontaneous literary schools : the forms which literature 
takes are either occasional and dependent upon outward events, 
such as the wide and varied attack and defence consequent upon 
the French Revolution, or else fantastic, trivial, reflex. Some- 
times the absence of any distinct and creative impulse reveals 
itself in work really good and useful, such as the editing of old 
writers, of which the labours of Malone are the chief example and 
the forgeries of Ireland the corresponding corruption ; or the 
return to their study aesthetically, in which Headley, a now for- 
gotten critic, did good work. Sometimes it resulted in such 



4 8 THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY chap, i 

things as the literary reputation (which was an actual thing after 
a kind) of persons like Sir James Bland Burges, Under-Secretary 
of State, poetaster, connoisseur, and general fribble. Yet all the 
while, in schools and universities, in London garrets and country 
villages, there was growing up, and sometimes showing itself pretty 
unmistakably, the generation which was to substitute for this 
trying and trifling the greatest work in verse, and not the least in 
prose, that had been done for two hundred years. The Lyrical 
Ballads of 1798, the clarion-call of the new poetry, so clearly 
sounded, so inattentively heard, might have told all, and did tell 
some, what this generation was about to do. 



CHAPTER II 



THE NEW POETRY 



The opening years of the eighth decade of the eighteenth century 
saw, in unusually close conjunction, the births of the men who 
were to be the chief exponents, and in their turn the chief deter- 
mining forces, of the new movement. The three greatest were 
born, Wordsworth in 1770, Scott in 1771, and Coleridge in 1772; 
Southey, who partly through accident was to form a trinity with 
Wordsworth and Coleridge, and who was perhaps the most typical 
instance of a certain new kind of man of letters, followed in 1 774 ; 
while Lamb and Hazlitt, the chief romantic pioneers in criticism, 
Jeffrey and Sydney Smith, the chief classical reactionaries therein, 
were all born within the decade. But the influence of Scott was 
for various reasons delayed a little ; and critics naturally come 
after creators. So that the time-honoured eminence of the 
" Lake Poets " — Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey — need not 
be disturbed. 

The day of the birth of William Wordsworth was the 7th of 
April, the place Cockermouth. His father was an attorney, and, as 
Lord Lonsdale's agent, a man of some means and position ; but 
on his death in 1783 the eccentric and unamiable character of 
the then Lord Lonsdale, by delaying the settlement of accounts, 
put the family in considerable difficulties. Wordsworth, however, 
was thoroughly educated at Hawkshead Grammar School and 
St. John's College, Cambridge, where he took his B.A. degree in 
1 791. He travelled in France, and for a time, like many young 
e 49 



5 o THE NEW POETRY 



men, was a fervent Republican ; but, like all the nobler of those 
who had " hailed the dawn of the French Revolution," he lived 
to curse its noon. He published early, his first volume of poems 
bearing the date 1793; but, though that attention to nature which 
was always his chief note appeared here, the work is not by any 
means of an epoch-making character. He was averse from every 
profession ; but the fates were kind to him, and a legacy of ,£900 
from his friend Raisley Calvert made a man of such simple tastes 
as his independent, for a time at least. On the strength of it he 
settled first at Racedown in Dorset, and then at Alfoxden in 
Somerset, in the companionship of his sister Dorothy; and at the 
second of the two places in the neighbourhood of Coleridge. 
Massive and original .is Wordsworth's own genius was, it is almost 
impossible to exaggerate the effect, both in stimulus and guidance, 
of the influence of these two ; for Dorothy Wordsworth was a 
woman of a million, and Coleridge, marvellous as were his own 
powers, was almost more marvellous in the unique Socratic 
character of his effect on those who possessed anything to 
work upon. The two poets produced in 179S the Lyrical 
Ballads, among the contents of which it is sufficient to mention 
Tintern Abbey and Tlie Ancient Mariner; and they subsequently 
travelled together in Germany. Then Wordsworth returned to 
his native lakes and never left them for long, abiding first at or 
near Grasmere, and from 1S13 at his well-known home of Rydal 
Mount. When Lord Lonsdale died in 1802, his successor 
promptly and liberally settled the Wordsworth claims. The poet 
soon married his cousin Mary Hutchinson ; and Lord Lonsdale, 
not satisfied with atoning for his predecessor's injustice, procured 
him, in the year of his migration to Rydal, the office of Distribu- 
tor of Stamps for Westmoreland — an office which was almost 
a sinecure, and was, for a man of Wordsworth's tastes, more than 
amply paid. It is curious, and a capital instance to prove that the 
malignity of fortune has itself been maligned, that the one English 
poet who was constitutionally incapable of writing for bread never 
was under any necessity to do so. For full sixty years Wordsworth 



WORDSWORTH 51 



wandered much, read little, meditated without stint, and wrote, 
though never hurriedly, yet almost incessantly. The dates of his 
chief publications may be best given in a note. 1 For some years 
his poems were greeted by the general public and by a few of its 
critical guides with storms of obloquy and ridicule ; but Words- 
worth, though never indifferent to criticism, was severely disdainful 
of it, and held on his way. From the first the brightest spirits of 
England had been his passionate though by no means always un- 
discriminating admirers ; and about the end of the first quarter of 
the century the public began to come round. Oxford, always first 
to recognise, if not always first to produce, the greatest achiev- 
ments of English literature, gave him its D.C.L. in 1839. He 
received a pension of ,£300 a year in 1842 from Sir Robert Peel, 
who, unlike most English Prime Ministers, cared for men of 
letters ; the laureateship fell to him in right of right on Southey's 
death in 1843, and he died on the 23rd of April 1S50, having 
come to fourscore years almost without labour, and without many 
heavy sorrows. 

Of his character not much need be said. Like that of Milton, 
whom he in many ways resembled (they had even both, as Hartley 
Coleridge has pointed out, brothers named Christopher), it was 
not wholly amiable, and the defects in it were no doubt aggravated 
by his early condition (for it must be remembered that till he 
was two and thirty his prospects were of the most disquieting char- 
acter), by the unjust opposition which the rise of his reputation 
met with, and by his solitary life in contact only with worshipping 
friends and connections. One of these very worshippers con- 
fesses that he was " inhumanly arrogant " : and he was also, what 
all arrogant men are not, rude. He was entirely self-centred, and 
his own circle of interests and tastes was not wide. It is said 
that he would cut books with a buttery knife, and after that it is 

1 Lyrical Ballads, 1798, and with additions 1800; Poems, 1807 (in these four 
volumes even adorers have allowed all his greatest work to be included) ; The Ex- 
cursion, 1814; The White Doe of Rylston, 1815; Sonnets on the River Duddoii , and 
others, 1819-20. In 1836 he brought out a collected edition of his poems in six 
volumes. The Prelude was posthumous. 



52 THE NEW POETRY 



probably unnecessary to say any more, for the fact " surprises by 
itself" an indictment of almost infinite counts. 

But his genius is not so easily despatched. I have said that 
it is now as a whole universally recognised, and I cannot but 
think that Mr. Matthew Arnold was wrong when he gave a 
contrary opinion some fifteen years ago. He must have been 
biassed by his own remembrance of earlier years, when Wordsworth 
was still a bone of contention. I should say that never since I 
myself was an undergraduate, that is to say, for the last thirty 
years, has there been any dispute among Englishmen whose 
opinion was worth taking, and who cared for poetry at all, on the 
general merits of Wordsworth. But this agreement is compatible 
with a vast amount of disagreement in detail ; and Mr. Arnold's 
own estimate, as where he compares Wordsworth with Moliere 
(who was not a poet at all, though he sometimes wrote very 
tolerable verse), weighs him with poets of the second class like 
Gray and Manzoni, and finally admits him for his dealings with 
"life," introduces fresh puzzlements into the valuation. There is 
only one principle on which that valuation can properly proceed, 
and this is the question, " Is the poet rich in essentially poetical 
moments of the highest power and kind ? " And by poetical 
moments I mean those instances of expression which, no matter 
what their subject, their intention, or their context may be, cause 
instantaneously in the fit reader a poetical impression of the 
intensest and most moving quality. 

Let us consider the matter from this point of view. 1 

The chief poetical influences under which Wordsworth began 

1 It must be remembered that Wordsworth was a prose writer of considerable 
excellence and of no small volume. Many people no doubt were surprised when 
Dr. Grosart, by collecting his pamphlets, his essays, his notes, and his letters, 
managed to fill three large octavo volumes. But his poetry so far outweighs his 
prose (though, like most poets, he could write admirably in his pedestrian style 
when he chose) that his utterances in "the other harmony" need not be specially 
considered. The two most considerable examples of this prose are the pamphlet 
on The Convention of Cintra and the five and twenty years later Guide to the 
Lakes. But minor essays, letters of a more or less formal character, and prefaces 
and notes to the poems, make up a goodly total ; and always display a genius 
germane to that of the poems. 



WORDSWORTH 53 



to write appear to have been those of Burns and Milton ; both 
were upon him to the last, and both did him harm as well as 
good. It was probably in direct imitation of Burns, as well as in 
direct opposition to the prevailing habits of the eighteenth century, 
that he conceived the theory of poetic diction which he defended 
in prose and exemplified in verse. The chief point of this theory 
was the use of the simplest and most familiar language, and the 
double fallacy is sufficiently obvious. Wordsworth forgot that 
the reason why the poetic diction of the three preceding genera- 
tions had become loathsome was precisely this, that it had become 
familiar ; while the familiar Scots of Burns was in itself un- 
familiar to the English ear. On the other hand, he borrowed 
from Milton, and used more and more as he grew older, a 
distinctly stiff and unvernacular form of poetic diction itself. Few 
except extreme and hopeless Wordsworthians now deny that the 
result of his attempts at simple language was and is far more 
ludicrous than touching. The wonderful Affliction of Margaret 
does not draw its power from the neglect of poetic diction, but 
from the intensity of emotion which would carry off almost any 
diction, simple or affected ; while on the other hand such pieces 
as " We are Seven," as the " Anecdote for Fathers," and as " Alice 
Fell," not to mention " Betty Foy " and others, which specially in- 
furiated Wordsworth's own contemporaries, certainly gain nothing 
from their namby-pamby dialect, and sometimes go near to losing 
the beauty that really is in them by dint of it. Moreover, the 
Miltonic blank verse and sonnets — at their best of a stately 
magnificence surpassed by no poet — have a tendency to become 
heavy and even dull when the poetic fire fails to fuse and shine 
through them. In fact it may be said of Wordsworth, as of most 
poets with theories, that his theories helped him very little, and 
sometimes hindered him a great deal. 

His real poetical merits are threefold, and lie first in the in- 
explicable, the ultimate, felicity of phrase which all great poets must 
have, and which only great poets have ; secondly, in his matchless 
power of delineating natural objects; and lastly, more properly, 



54 THE NEW POETRY 



and with most special rarity of all, in the half-pantheistic mysti- 
cism which always lies behind this observation, and which every 
now and then breaks through it, puts it, as mere observation, aside, 
and blazes in unmasked fire of rapture. The summits of Words- 
worth's poetry, the "Lines Written at Tintern Abbey "and the 
"Ode on Intimations of Immortality," — poems of such astonish- 
ing magnificence that it is only more astonishing that any one 
should have read them and failed to see what a poet had come 
before the world, — are the greatest of many of these revelations 
or inspirations. It is indeed necessary to read Wordsworth 
straight through — a proceeding which requires that the reader 
shall be in good literary training, but is then feasible, profitable, 
and even pleasant enough — to discern the enormous height at 
which the great Ode stands above its author's other work. The 
Tintern Abbey lines certainly approach it nearest : many smaller 
things — "The Affliction of Margaret," "The Daffodils," and 
others — group well under its shadow, and innumerable passages 
and even single lines, such as that which all good critics have noted 
as lightening the darkness of the Prelude — 

Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone — 

must of course be added to the poet's credit. But the Ode remains 
not merely the greatest, but the one really, dazzlingly, supremelv 
great thing he ever did. Its theory has been scorned or impugned 
by some ; parts of it have even been called nonsense by critics of 
weight. But, sound or unsound, sense or nonsense, it is poetry, 
and magnificent poetry, from the first line to the last — poetry than 
which there is none better in any language, poetry such as there is 
not perhaps more than a small volume-full in all languages. The 
second class of merit, that of vivid observation, abounds where- 
ever the poems are opened. But the examples of the first are 
chiefly found in the lyrics " My Heart Leaps up," "The Sparrow's 
Nest"; the famous daffodil poem which Jeffrey thought "stuff," 
which some say Dorothy wrote chiefly, and which is almost 
perfect of its kind ; the splendid opening of the " Lines to Hart- 



WORDSWORTH 



55 



ley Coleridge," which connect themselves with the " Immortality 
Ode " ; the exquisite group of the " Cuckoo," the best patches 
of the Burns poems, and the three " Yarrows " ; the " Peel 
Castle " stanzas ; and, to cut a tedious catalogue short, the 
hideously named but in parts perfectly beautiful " Effusion on the 
Death of James Hogg," the last really masterly thing that the poet 
did. In some of these we may care little for the poem as a whole, 
nothing for the moral the poet wishes to draw. But the poetic 
moments seize us, the poetic flash dazzles our eyes, and the 
whole divine despair or not more divine rapture which poetry 
causes comes upon us. 

One division of Wordsworth's work is so remarkable that it 
must have such special and separate mention as it is here possible 
to give it ; and that is his exercises in the sonnet, wherein to some 
tastes he stands only below Shakespeare and on a level with 
Milton. The sonnet, after being long out of favour, paying for its 
popularity between Wyatt and Milton by neglect, had, principally 
it would seem on the very inadequate example of Bowles (see 
infra), become a very favourite form with the new Romantics. 
But none of them wrote it with the steady persistence, and none 
except Keats with the occasional felicity, of Wordsworth. Its 
thoughtfulness suited his bent, and its limits frustrated his 
prolixity, though, it must be owned, he somewhat evaded this 
benign influence by writing in series. And the sonnets on " The 
Venetian Republic," on the " Subjugation of Switzerland," that 
beginning " The world is too much with us," that in November 
1806, the first " Personal Talk," the magnificent "Westminster 
Bridge," and the opening at least of that on Scott's departure 
from Abbotsford, are not merely among the glories of Wordsworth, 
they are among the glories of English poetry. 

Unfortunately these moments of perfection are, in the poet's 
whole work, and especially in that part of it which was composed 
in the later half of his long life, by no means very frequent. 
Wordsworth was absolutely destitute of humour, from which it 
necessarily followed that his self-criticism was either non-existent 



56 THE NEW POETRY chap. 

or constantly at fault. His verse was so little facile, it paid so little 
regard to any of the common allurements of narrative-interest or 
varied subject, it was so necessary for it to reach the full white heat, 
the absolute instant of poetic projection, that when it was not very 
good it was apt to be scarcely tolerable. It is nearly impossible 
to be duller than Wordsworth at his dullest, and unluckily it is 
as impossible to find a poet of anything like his powers who has 
given himself the license to be dull so often and at such length. 
The famous "Would he had blotted a thousand" applies to him 
with as much justice as it was unjust in its original application ; and 
it is sometimes for pages together a positive struggle to remember 
that one is reading one of the greatest of English poets, and a poet 
whose influence in making other poets has been second hardly 
to that of Spenser, of Keats, or of the friend who follows him 
in our survey. 

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Devonshire, at Ottery 
St. Mary, of which place his father was vicar, on the 21st October 
1772. The family was merely respectable before his day, but 
since it has been of very unusual distinction, intellectual and other. 
He went to Christ's Hospital when he was not quite ten years 
old, and in 1791 was admitted to an exhibition at Jesus Col- 
lege, Cambridge, with his thoughts already directed to poetry by 
the sonnets of Bowles above mentioned, and with a reputation, 
exaggerated perhaps, but certainly not invented, in Lamb's famous 
" Elia " paper on his old school. Indeed, high as is Coleridge's 
literary position on the strength of his writing alone, his talk and 
its influence on hearers have been unanimously set higher still. 
He did very well at first, gaining the Browne Medal for Greek 
Verse and distinguishing himself for the Craven Scholarship ; but 
he speedily fell in love, in debt, it is suspected in drink, and it is 
known into various political and theological heresies. He left 
Cambridge and enlisted at Reading in the 15th Light Dragoons. 
He obtained his discharge, however, in three or four months, and 
no notice except a formal admonition appears to have been taken 
of his resuming his position at Cambridge. Indeed he was shortly 



COLERIDGE 57 



after elected to a Foundation Scholarship. But in the summer of 
1 794 he visited Oxford, and after he had fallen in with Southey, 
whose views were already Jacobinical, the pair engaged themselves 
to Pantisocracy ' and the Miss Frickers. This curious and often 
told story cannot be even summarised here. Its immediate result 
was that Coleridge left the University without taking a degree, and, 
though not at once, married Sarah Fricker on October 1795. 
Thenceforward he lived on literature and his friends, especially 
the latter. He tried Unitarian preaching and newspaper work, 
of which at one time or another he did a good deal. The curious 
ins and outs of Coleridge's strange though hardly eventful life have, 
after being long most imperfectly known, been set forth in fullest 
measure by Mr. Dykes Campbell. It must suffice here to say 
that, after much wandering, being unable or unwilling to keep 
house with his own family, he found asylums, first with some kind 
folk named Morgan, and then in the house of Mr. Gillman at 
Hampstead, where for years he held forth to rising men of 
letters, and where he died on the 25th June 1834. His too 
notorious craving for opium had never been conquered, though 
it had latterly been kept in some check. 

Despite this unfortunate failing and his general inability to 
carry out any schemes of work on the great scale, Coleridge's 
literary production was very considerable, and, except the verse, 
it has never been completely collected or systematically edited. 
He began verse-writing very early, and early found a vent for it in 
the Morning Chronicle, then a Radical organ. He wrote The 
Fall of Robespierre in conjunction with Southey in 1794, and 
published it. Some prose pamphlets followed, and then Cottle, 
the Bristol providence of this group of men of letters, offered 
thirty guineas for a volume of poems, which duly appeared in 
1796. Meanwhile Coleridge had started a singular newspaper 
called The Watchman, which saw ten numbers, appearing every 

1 This word, as well as " Aspheterism," which has had a less general currency, 
was a characteristic coinage of Coleridge's to designate a kind of Communism, 
partly based on the speculations of Godwin, and intended to be carried into 
practice in America. 



5 8 THE NEW POETRY 



eighth day. The Lyrical Ballads followed in 1798, and mean- 
while Coleridge had written the play of Osorio (to appear long 
afterwards as Remorse), had begun Chris label, and had contributed 
some of his best poems to the Morning Post. His German visit 
(see ante) produced among other things the translation of Wallen- 
stein, a translation far above the original. Some poetry and much 
newspaper work filled the next ten years, with endless schemes ; 
but in 1807 Coleridge began to lecture at the Royal Institution — 
a course somewhat irregularly delivered, and almost entirely un- 
reported. 1809 saw his second independent periodical venture, 
The Friend, the subsequent reprint of which as a book is com- 
pletely rewritten. In 1811-12 he delivered his second course 
of lectures, this time on his own account. It was followed by two 
others, and in 1813 Remorse was produced at Drury Lane, had a 
fair success, and brought the author some money. Chrisiabel, 
with Kubla Khan, appeared in 18 16, and the Biographia Liter aria 
next year ; Zapolya and the rewritten Friend the year after, when 
also Coleridge gave a new course of lectures, and yet another, the 
last. Aids to Reflection, in 1825, was the latest important work he 
issued himself, though in 1828 he superintended a collection of 
his poems. Such of the rest of his work as is in existence in a 
collected form has been printed or reprinted since. 

A more full account of the appearance of Coleridge's work than 
is desirable or indeed possible in most cases here has been given, 
because it is important to convey some idea of the astonishingly 
piecemeal fashion in which it reached the world. To those who 
have studied the author's life of opium-eating ; of constant wander- 
ing from place to place ; of impecuniousness so utter that, after all 
the painstaking of the modern biographer, and after full allowance 
for the ravens who seem always to have been ready to feed him, it 
is a mystery how he escaped the workhouse ; of endless schemes 
and endless non-performance — it is only a wonder that anything of 
Coleridge's ever reached the public except in newspaper columns. 
As it was, while his most ambitiously planned books were never 
written at all, most of those which did reach the press were years 



COLERIDGE 59 



in getting through it ; and Southey, on one occasion, after waiting 
fifteen months for the conclusion of a contribution of Coleridge's 
to Omniana, had to cancel the sheet in despair. The collection, 
after many years, by Mr. Ernest Coleridge of his grandfather's 
letters has by no means completely removed the mystery which 
hangs over Coleridge's life and character. We see a little more, 
but we do not see the whole ; and we are still unable to understand 
what strange impediments there were to the junction of the two 
ends of power and performance. A rigid judge might almost say, 
that if friends had not been so kind, fate had been kinder, and 
that instead of helping they hindered, just as a child who is never 
allowed to tumble will never learn to walk. 

The enormous tolerance of friends, however, which alone en- 
abled him to produce anything, was justified by the astonishing 
genius to which its possessor gave so unfair a chance. As a 
thinker, although the evidence is too imperfect to justify very 
dogmatic conclusions, the opinion of the best authorities, from 
which there is little reason for differing, is that Coleridge was 
much more stimulating than intrinsically valuable. His Aids to 
Reflection, his most systematic work, is disappointing ; and, with 
The Friend and the rest, is principally valuable as exhibiting and 
inculcating an attitude of mind in which the use of logic is not, as 
in most eighteenth century philosophers, destructive, but is made 
to consist with a wide license for the employment of imagination 
and faith. He borrowed a great deal from the Germans, and he 
at least sometimes forgot that he had borrowed a great deal from 
our own older writers. 

So, too, precise examination of his numerous but fragmentary 
remains as a literary critic makes it necessary to take a great deal 
for granted. Here, also, he Germanised much ; and it is not 
certain, even with the aid of his fragments, that he was the equal 
either of Lamb or of Hazlitt in insight. Perhaps his highest 
claim is that, in the criticism of philosophy, of religion, and of 
literature alike he expressed, and was even a little ahead of, the 
nobler bent and sympathy of his contemporaries. We are still 



6o THE NEW POETRY 



content to assign to Coleridge, perhaps without any very certain 
title-deeds, the invention of that more catholic way of looking at 
English literature which can relish the Middle Ages without doing 
injustice to contemporaries, and can be enthusiastic for the seven- 
teenth century without contemning the eighteenth. 1 To him more 
than to any single man is also assigned (and perhaps rightly, though 
some of his remarks on the Church, even after his rally to ortho- 
doxy, are odd) the great ecclesiastical revival of the Oxford 
movement ; and it is certain that he had not a little to do with 
the abrupt discarding of the whole tradition of Locke, Berkeley 
and Hartley only excepted. Difficult as it may be to give distinct 
chapter and verse for these assignments from the formless welter 
of his prose works, no good judge has ever doubted their validity, 
with the above and other exceptions and guards. It may be 
very difficult to present Coleridge's assets in prose in a liquid 
form ; but few doubt their value. 

It is very different with his poetry. Here, too, the disastrous, 
the almost ruinous results of his weaknesses appear. When one 
begins to sift and riddle the not small mass of his verse, it shrinks 
almost appallingly in bulk. Wallenstein, though better than the 
original, is after all only a translation. Remorse (either under that 
name or as Osorio) and Zapolya are not very much better than the 
contemporary or slightly later work of Talfourd and Milman. 
The Fall of Robespierre is as absurd and not so amusing as 
Southey's unassisted Wat Tyler. Of the miscellaneous verse 
with which, after these huge deductions, we are left, much is verse- 
impromptu, often learned and often witty, for Coleridge was (in 
early days at any rate) abundantly provided with both wit and 
humour, but quite occasional. Much more consists of mere 
Juvenilia. Even of the productions of his best times (the last 
lustrum of the eighteenth century and a lucid interval about 1816) 

1 Yet this praise can only be assigned to Coleridge with large allowance. He 
was always unjust to his own immediate predecessors, Johnson, Gibbon, etc. ; 
and he was not too sensible of the real merits of Pope or even of Dryden. In this 
respect Leigh Hunt, an immeasurably weaker thinker, had a much more catholic 
taste. And it is not certain that, as a mere prose writer, Coleridge was a very 
good prose writer. 



COLERIDGE 61 



much is not very good. Religious Musings, though it has had its 
admirers, is terribly poor stuff. The Monody on the Death of 
Chatterton might have been written by fifty people during the 
century before it. The Destiny of Nations is a feeble rant; but 
the Ode on the Departing Year, though still unequal, still con- 
ventional, strikes a very different note. The Three Graves, though 
injured by the namby-pambiness which was still thought incumbent 
in ballads, again shows no vulgar touch. And then, omitting for 
the moment Kubla Khan, which Coleridge said he wrote in 1797, 
but of which no mortal ever heard till 18 16, we come to The Rime 
of the Ancient Mariner and the birth of the new poetry in England. 
Here the stutters and flashes of Blake became coherent speech 
and steady blaze ; here poetry, which for a century and a half had 
been curbing her voice to a genteel whisper or raising it only to 
a forensic declamation, which had at best allowed a few wood- 
notes to escape here and there as if by mistake, spoke out loud 
and clear. 

If this statement seems exaggerated (and it is certain that 
at the time of the appearance of the Ancient Mariner not even 
Wordsworth, not even Southey quite relished it, while there 
has always been a sect of dissidents against it), two others will 
perhaps seem more extravagant still. The second is that, with 
the exception of this poem, of Kubla Khan, of Christabel, and of 
Love, all of them according to Coleridge written within a few 
months of each other in 1 797-98, he never did anything of the first 
class in poetry. The third is that these four — though Christabel 
itself does not exceed some fifteen hundred lines and is decidedly 
unequal, though the Ancient Mariner is just over six hundred 
and the other two are quite short — are sufficient between them 
to rank their author among the very greatest of English poets. 
It is not possible to make any compromise on this point ; for 
upon it turns an entire theory and system of poetical criticism. 
Those who demand from poetry a " criticism of life," those who 
will have it that "all depends on the subject," those who want 
"moral "or " construction " or a dozen other things, — all good 



62 THE NEW POETRY 



in their way, most of them compatible with poetry and even help- 
ful to it, but none of them essential thereto, — can of course never 
accept this estimate. Mrs. Barbauld said that The Ancient 
Mariner was "improbable"; and to this charge it must plead 
guilty at once. Kubla Khan, which I should rank as almost the 
best of the four, is very brief, and is nothing but a dream, and a 
fragment of a dream. Love is very short too, and is flawed by 
some of the aforesaid namby-pambiness, from which none of the 
Lake school escaped when they tried passion. Christabel, the 
most ambitious if also the most unequal, does really underlie the 
criticism that, professing itself to be a narrative and holding out 
the promise of something like a connected story, it tells none, and 
does not even offer very distinct hints or suggestions or what its 
story, if it had ever been told, might have been. A thousand 
faults are in it ; a good part of the thousand in all four. 

But there is also there something which would atone for faults 
ten thousand times ten thousand ; there is what one hears at most 
three or four times in English, at most ten or twelve times in all 
literature — the first note, with its endless echo-promise, of a new 
poetry. The wonderful cadence-changes of Kubla Khan, its 
phrases, culminating in the famous distich so well descriptive of 
Coleridge himself — 

For he on honey dew hath fed, 
And drunk the milk of Paradise, 

the splendid crash of the 

Ancestral voices prophesying war, 

are all part of this note and cry. You will find them nowhere 
from Chaucer to Cowper — not even in the poets where you will 
find greater things as you may please to call them. Then in the 
Mariner comes the gorgeous metre, — freed at once and for the 
first time from the " butter-woman's rank to market " which had 
distinguished all imitations of the ballad hitherto, — the more gor- 
geous imagery and pageantry here, the simple directness there, the 



SOUTH EY 



tameless range of imagination and fancy, the fierce rush of 
rhythm : — 

The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, 

The furrow followed free : 
We were the first that ever burst 
Into that silent sea. 

And thereafter the spectre of Life-in-Death, the water-snakes, 
the rising of the dead men, the snapping of the spell. There had 
been nothing like all this before ; and in all the hundred years, 
for all the great poetry we have seen, we have seen nothing so 
new as it. Love gave the magnificent opening stanza, the motto 
and defence at once of the largest, the most genuine, the most 
delightful part of poetry. And Cliristabel, independently of its 
purple patches, such as the famous descant on the quarrels of 
friends, and the portents that mark the passage of Geraldine, gave 
what was far more important — a new metre, destined to have no 
less great and much more copious influence than the Spenserian 
stanza itself. It might of course be easy to pick out anticipations 
in part of this combination of iambic dimeter, trochaic, and ana- 
paestic ; but it never had taken thorough form before. And how 
it seized on the imagination of those who heard it is best shown 
by the well-known anecdote of Scott, who, merely hearing a little 
of it recited, at once developed it and established it in The Lay 
of the Last Minstrel. In verse at least, if not in prose, there is 
no greater master than Coleridge. 

Robert Southey, the third of this curiously dissimilar trio 
whom partly chance and partly choice have bound together for all 
time, was born at Bristol on 12th August 1774. His father was 
only a linen-draper, and a very unprosperous one ; but the Southeys 
were a respectable family, entitled to arms, and possessed of con- 
siderable landed property in Somerset, some of which was left 
away from the poet by unfriendly uncles to strangers, while more 
escaped him by a flaw in the entail. His mother's family, the 
Hills, were in much better circumstances than his father, and 
like the other two Lake Poets he was singularly lucky in finding 



64 THE NEW POETRY 



helpers. First his mother's brother the Rev. Herbert Hill, chap- 
lain to the English factory at Lisbon, sent him to Westminster, 
where he did very well and made invaluable friends, but lost the 
regular advancement to Christ Church owing to the wrath of the 
head-master Dr. Vincent at an article which Southey had contri- 
buted to a school magazine, the Flagellant. He was in fact 
expelled ; but the gravest consequences of expulsion from a public 
school of the first rank did not fall upon him, and he matricu- 
lated without objection at Balliol in 1793. His college, however, 
which was then distinguished for loose living and intellectual 
dulness, was not congenial to him ; and developing extreme 
opinions in politics and religion, he decided that he could not 
take orders, and left without even taking a degree. His disgrace 
with his own friends was completed by his engaging in the Pantis- 
ocratic scheme, and by his attachment to Edith Fricker, a penniless 
girl (though not at all a " milliner at Bath ") whose sisters became 
Mrs. Coleridge and Mrs. Lovell. And when the ever-charitable 
Hill invited him to Portugal he married Miss Fricker the very 
day before he started. After a residence at Lisbon, in which he 
laid the foundation of his unrivalled acquaintance with Penin- 
sular history and literature, he returned and lived with his wife 
at various places, nominally studying for the law, which he liked 
not better but worse than the Church. After divers vicissitudes, 
including a fresh visit (this time not as a bachelor) to Portugal, 
and an experience of official work as secretary to Corry the Irish 
Chancellor of the Exchequer, he at last, at the age of thirty, estab- 
lished himself at Greta Hall, close to Keswick, where Coleridge 
had already taken up his abode. This, as well as much else in 
his career, was made possible by the rare generosity of his friend 
of school-days and all days, Charles Wynn, brother of the then 
Sir Watkin, and later a pretty well known politician, who on 
coming of age gave him an annuity of ,£160 a year. This in 
1807 he relinquished on receiving a government pension of 
practically the same amount. The Laureateship in 18 13 brought 
him less than another hundred ; but many years afterwards 



ii SOUTHEY 65 

Sir Robert Peel, in 1835, after offering a baronetcy, put his 
declining years out of anxiety by conferring a further pension of 
^300 a year on him. These declining years were in part un- 
happy. As early as 18 16 his eldest son Herbert, a boy of great 
promise, died ; the shock was repeated some years later by the 
death of his youngest and prettiest daughter Isabel ; while in the 
same year as that in which his pension was increased his wife 
became insane, and died two years later. A second marriage in 
1839 to the poetess Caroline Bowles brought him some comfort; 
but his own brain became more and more affected, and for a 
considerable time before his death on 21st March 1843 he had 
been mentally incapable. 

Many morals have been drawn from this melancholy end as 
to the wisdom of too prolonged literary labour, which in Southey's 
case had certainly been prodigious, and had been carried so far 
that he actually read while he was taking constitutional walks. 
It is fair to say, however, that, just as in the case of Scott the 
terrible shock of the downfall of his fortunes has to be considered, 
so in that of Southey the successive trials to which he, a man 
of exceptionally strong domestic affections, was exposed, must be 
taken into account. At the same time it must be admitted that 
Southey's production was enormous. His complete works never 
have been, and are never likely to be collected ; and, from the 
scattered and irregular form in which they appeared, it is difficult 
if not impossible to make even a guess at the total. The list of 
books and articles (the latter for the most part written for the 
Quarterly Review, and of very great length) at the end of his 
son's Life fills nearly six closely printed pages. Two of these 
entries — the Histories of Brazil and of the Peninsular War — 
alone represent six large volumes. The Poems by themselves 
occupy a royal octavo in double columns of small print running 
to eight hundred pages ; the correspondence, very closely printed 
in the six volumes of the Life, and the four more of Letters edited 
by the Rev. J. W. Warter, some five thousand pages in all ; while 
a good deal of his early periodical work has never been identified, 

F 



66 THE NEW POETRY chap. 

and there are large stores of additional letters — some printed, 
more in MS. Nor was Southey by any means a careless or an 
easy writer. He always founded his work on immense reading, 
some of the results of which, showing the laborious fashion in 
which he performed it, were published after his death in his 
Commonplace Book. He did not write very rapidly ; and he 
corrected, both in MS. and in proof, with the utmost sedulity. 
Of the nearly 14,000 books which he possessed at his death, it 
is safe to say that all had been methodically read, and most 
read many times ; while his almost mediaeval diligence did 
not hesitate at working through a set of folios to obtain the 
information or the corrections necessary for a single article. 

It is here impossible to mention more than the chief items of 
this portentous list. They are in verse — Poems, by R. Southey 
and R. Lovell, 1794 ; Joan of Arc, 1795 ; Minor Poems, 1797-99 ; 
Thalaba, 1801 ; Ale trie al Tales and Madoc, 1805 ; The Curse of 
Kehama, 1S10; Roderick, 1814; with a few later volumes, the 
chief being the unlucky Vision of Judgment, 182 1, in hexameters. 
A complete edition of the Poems, except one or two posthumously 
printed, was published by himself in ten volumes in 1837, and 
collected into one ten years later with the additions. This also 
includes Wat Tyler, a rhapsody of the poet's youth, which was 
(piratically and to his infinite annoyance) published in 181 7. 

In prose Southey's most important works are the History of 
Brazil, 1810-19 (this, large as it is, is only a kind of offshoot 
of the projected History of Portugal, which in a way occupied his 
whole life, and never got published at all) ; the History of the 
Peninsular War, 1822-32; the Letters from England by Don 
Manuel Espriella, 1812 ; the Life of Nelson (usually thought his 
masterpiece), 1813; the Life of Wesley, 1820; The Book of the 
Church, 1824; Colloquies on Society (well known, if not in itself, 
for Macaulay's review of it), 1829 ; Naval History, 1833-40; and 
the great humorous miscellany of The Doctor (seven volumes), 
1834-47 ; to which must be added editions, often containing some 
of his best work, of Chatterton, Amadis of Gaul, Palmerin of Eng- 



ii SOUTHEY'S POEMS 67 

land, Kirke White, Bunyan, and Cowper, with divers Specimens of 
the British Poets, the charming prose and verse Chronicle of the 
Cid, the miscellany of Omniana, half-way between table- and 
commonplace-book, the Commonplace Book itself, and not a little 
else, besides letters and articles innumerable. 

Certain things about Southey are uncontested and uncontest- 
able. The uprightness and beauty of his character, his wonderful 
helpfulness to others, and the uncomplaining way in which he bore 
what was almost poverty, — for, high as was his reputation, his 
receipts were never a tithe of the rewards not merely of Scott or 
Byron or Tom Moore, but of much lesser men — are not more 
generally acknowledged than the singular and pervading excel- 
lence of his English prose style, the robustness of his literary genius, 
and his unique devotion to literature. But when we leave these 
accepted things he becomes more difficult if not less interesting. 
He himself had not the slightest doubt that he was a great poet, 
and would be recognised as such by posterity, though with a proud 
humility he reconciled himself to temporary lack of vogue. This 
might be set down to an egotistic delusion. But such an easy ex- 
planation is negatived by even a slight comparison of the opinions 
of his greatest contemporaries. It is somewhat staggering to find 
that Scott, the greatest Tory man of letters who had strong polit- 
ical sympathies, and Fox, the greatest Whig politician who had 
keen literary tastes, enjoyed his long poems enthusiastically. 
But it may be said that the eighteenth century leaven which was 
so strong in each, and which is also noticeable in Southey, con- 
ciliated them. What then are we to say of Macaulay, a much 
younger man, a violent political opponent of Southey, and a by no 
means indiscriminate lover of verse, who, admitting that he doubted 
whether Southey's long poems would be read after half a century, 
had no doubt that if read they would be admired ? And what are we 
to say of the avowals of admiration wrung as it were from Byron, 
who succeeded in working himself up, from personal, political, and 
literary motives combined, into a frantic hatred of Southey, lam- 
pooned him in print, sent him a challenge (which luckily was not 



68 THE NEW POETRY 



delivered) in private, and was what the late Mr. Mark Pattison 
would have called " his Satan " ? 

The half century of Macaulay's prophecy has come, and that 
prophecy has been fulfilled as to the rarity of Southey's readers as a 
poet. Has the other part come true too? I should hesitate to 
say that it has. Esteem not merely for the man but for the writer 
can never fail Southey whenever he is read by competent persons : 
admiration may be less prompt to come at call. Two among his 
smaller pieces — the beautiful "Holly Tree," and the much later 
but exquisite stanzas " My days among the dead are past " — can 
never be in any danger ; the grasp of the grotesque-terrific, which 
the poet shows in the " Old Woman of Berkley " and a great many 
other places, anticipates the Ingoldsby Legends with equal ease but 
with a finer literary gift ; some other things are really admirable and 
not a little pleasing. But the longer poems, if they are ever to 
live, are still dry bones. Tluilaba, one of the best, is spoilt by the 
dogged craze against rhyme, which is more, not less, needed in 
irregular than in regular verse. Joan of Arc, Madoe, Roderick, 
have not escaped that curse of blank verse which only Milton, 
and he not always, has conquered in really long poems. Kehama, 
the only great poem in which the poet no longer disdains the 
almost indispensable aid to poetry in our modern and loosely 
quantified tongue, is much better than any of the others. The 
Curse itself is about as good as it can be, and many other passages 
are not far below it ; but to the general taste the piece suffers 
from the remote character of the subject, which is not generally and 
humanly interesting, and from the mass of tedious detail. 

To get out of the difficulty thus presented by indulging in 
contemptuous ignoring of Southey's merits has been attempted 
many times since Emerson foolishly asked "Who is Southey?" 
in his jottings of his conversation with Landor, Southey's most 
dissimilar but constant friend and panegyrist. It is extremely 
easy to say who Southey is. He is the possessor of perhaps the 
purest and most perfect English prose style, of a kind at once 
simple and scholarly, to be found in the language. He has written 



II SCOTT 69 

(in the Life of Nelson) perhaps the best short biography in that 
language, and other things not far behind this. No Englishman 
has ever excelled him in range of reading or in intelligent com- 
prehension and memory of what he read. Unlike many book- 
worms, he had an exceedingly lively and active humour. He has 
scarcely an equal, and certainly no superior, in the rare and 
difficult art of discerning and ranging the material parts of an 
historical account : the pedant may glean, but the true historian 
will rarely reap after him. And in poetry his gifts, if they are 
never of the very highest, are so various and often so high that it 
is absolutely absurd to pooh-pooh him as a poet. The man who 
could write the verses " In my Library " and the best parts of 
Thalaba and Kehama certainly had it in his power to write other 
things as good, probably to write other things better. Had it 
been in his nature to take no thought not merely for the morrow 
but even for the day, like Coleridge, or in his fate to be provided 
for without any trouble on his own part, and to take the provision 
with self-centred indifference, like Wordsworth, his actual produc- 
tion might have been different and better. But his strenuous and 
generous nature could not be idle ; and idleness of some sort is, 
it may be very seriously laid down, absolutely necessary to the 
poet who is to be supreme. 

The poet who, though, according to the canons of poetical 
criticism most in favour during this century, he ranks lower than 
either Wordsworth or Coleridge, did far more to popularise the 
general theory of Romantic poetry than either, was a slightly older 
man than two of the trio just noticed ; but he did not begin his 
poetical career (save by one volume of translation) till some years 
after all of them had published. Walter Scott was born in 
Edinburgh on the 15th of August 1 771. His father, of the same 
name as himself, was a Writer to the Signet ; his mother was 
Anne Rutherford, and the future poet and novelist had much 
excellent Border blood in him, besides that of his direct ancestors 
the Scotts of Harden. He was a very sickly child ; and though 
he grew out of this he was permanently lame. His early childhood 



7o THE NEW POETRY 



was principally spent on the Border itself, with a considerable 
interval at Bath ; and he was duly sent to the High School and 
University of Edinburgh, where, like a good many other future 
men of letters, he was not extremely remarkable for what is called 
scholarship. He was early imprisoned in his father's office, where 
the state of relations between father and son is supposed to be 
pretty accurately represented by the story of those between Alan 
Fairford and his father in Redgauntlet; and, like Alan, he was 
called to the bar. But even in the inferior branch of the profession 
he enjoyed tolerable liberty of wandering about and sporting, 
besides sometimes making expeditions on business into the 
Highlands and other out-of-the-way parts of the country. 

He thus acquired great knowledge of his fatherland ; while 
(for he was, if not exactly a scholar, the most omnivorous of 
readers) he was also acquiring great knowledge of books. And it 
ought not to be omitted that Edinburgh, in addition to the literary 
and professional society which made it then and afterwards so 
famous, was still to no small extent the headquarters of the Scotch 
nobility, and that Scott, long before his books made him famous, 
was familiar with society of every rank. His first love affair did 
not run smooth, and he seems never to have entirely forgotten the 
object of it, who is identified (on somewhat more solid grounds 
than in the case of other novelists) with more than one of his 
heroines. But he consoled himself to a certain extent with a 
young lady half French, half English, Miss Charlotte Carpenter 
or Charpentier, whom he met at Gilsland and married at Carlisle 
on Christmas Eve 1797. Scott was an active member of the 
yeomanry as well as a barrister, an enthusiastic student of German 
as well as a sportsman ; and the book of translations (from 
Burger) above referred to appeared in 1796. But he did nothing 
important till after the beginning of the present century, when the 
starting of the Edinburgh Review and some other things brought 
him forward ; though he showed what he could do by contributing 
two ballads, "Glenfinlas" and "The Eve of St. John," to a collec- 
tion of terror-pieces started by Monk Lewis, and added Goethe's 



ii SCOTT 71 

G'dtz von Berlichingen to his translations. He had become in 
1799 independent, though not rich, by being appointed Sheriff of 
Selkirkshire. 

His beginnings as an author proper were connected, as was all 
his subsequent career, partly for good but more for ill, with a 
school friendship he had early formed for two brothers named 
Ballantyne at Kelso. He induced James, the elder, to start a 
printing business at Edinburgh, and unfortunately he entered into 
a secret partnership with this firm, which never did him much 
good, which caused him infinite trouble, and which finally ruined 
him. But into this complicated and still much debated business 
it is impossible to enter here. James Ballantyne printed the 
Border Minstrelsy, which appeared in 1802, — a book ranking 
with Percy's Reliques in its influence on the form and matter of 
subsequent poetry, — and then Scott at last undertook original 
work of magnitude. His task was The Lay of the Last Minstrel, 
published in 1805. It may almost be said that from that day to 
his death he was the foremost — he was certainly, with the exception 
of Byron, the most popular — man of letters in Great Britain. His 
next poems — Marmion (1808) and The Lady of the Lake (1810) — 
brought him fame and money such as no English poet had gained 
before ; and though Byron's following — for following it was — for 
the time eclipsed his master, the latter's Rokeby, The Lord of the 
Lsles, and others, would have been triumphs for any one else. 

How, when the taste for his verse seemed to cool, he struck 
out a new line in prose and achieved yet more fame and yet 
more money than the verse had ever given him, will concern us 
in the next chapter. But as it would be cumbrous to make yet a 
third division of his work, the part of his prose which is not 
fiction may be included here, as well as the rest of his life. He 
had written much criticism for the Edinburgh, until he was partly 
disgusted by an uncivil review of Marmion, partly (and more) 
by the tone of increasing Whiggery and non-intervention which 
Jeffrey was imposing on the paper ; and when the Quarterly was 
founded in opposition he transferred his services to that. He 



72 THE NEW POETRY 



edited a splendid and admirably done issue of Dryden (1808) and 
another not quite so thoroughly executed of Swift (1814), and his 
secret connection with the Ballantynes induced him to do much 
other editing and miscellaneous work. In the sad last years of 
his life he laboured with desperation at a great Life of Napoleon, 
which was a success pecuniarily but not in many other ways, 
produced the exquisite Tales of a Grandfather on Scottish history, 
and did much else. He even wrote plays, which have very little 
merit, and, except abstract philosophy, there is hardly a division 
of literature that he did not touch ; for he composed a sermon or 
two of merit, and his political pamphlets, the Letters of Malachi 
Malagrowther, opposing what he thought an interference with 
Scottish privileges in currency matters, are among the best of 
their kind. 

His life was for many years a very happy one ; for his marriage, 
if not passionately, was fairly successful, he was extremely fond 
of his children, and while his poems and novels began before 
he had fully reached middle life to make him a rich man, his 
Sheriffship, and a Clerkship of Session which was afterwards added 
(though he had to wait some time for its emoluments), had 
already made him secure of bread and expectant of affluence. 
From a modest cottage at Lasswade he expanded himself to a 
rented country house at Ashestiel on the Tweed, having besides a 
comfortable town mansion in Edinburgh ; and when he was turned 
out of Ashestiel he bought land and began to build at Abbotsford 
on the same river. The estate was an ill-chosen and unprofitable 
one. The house grew with the owner's fortunes, which, founded in 
part as they were on the hardest and most honest work that author 
ever gave, were in part also founded on the quicksand of his 
treacherous connection with men, reckless, ill-judging, and, though 
perhaps not in intention dishonest, perpetually trading on their 
secret partner's industry and fame. In the great commercial 
crash of 1825, Constable, the publisher of most of the novels, was 
involved ; he dragged the Ballantynes down with him ; and the 
whole of Scott's fortune, except his appointments and the little 



SCOTT'S POEMS 73 



settled on his wife and children, was liable for the Ballantynes' 
debts. But he was not satisfied with ruin. He must needs set to 
work at the hopeless task of paying debts which he had never, 
except technically, incurred, and he actually in the remaining years 
of his life cleared off the greater part of them. It was at the cost 
of his life itself. His wife died, his children were scattered ; but 
he worked on till the thankless, hopeless toil broke down his 
strength, and after a fruitless visit to Italy, he returned, to die at 
Abbotsford on 21st September 1832. 

Scott's poetry has gone through various stages of estimate, and 
it can hardly be said even now, a hundred years after the 
publication of his first verses, to have attained the position, prac- 
tically accepted by all but paradoxers, which in that time a poet 
usually gains, unless, as the poets of the seventeenth century did 
in the eighteenth, he falls, owing to some freak of popular taste, 
out of really critical consideration altogether. The immense 
popularity which it at first obtained has been noted, as well as the 
fact that it was only ousted from that popularity by, so to speak, 
a variety of itself. But the rise of Byron in the long run did it 
far less harm" than the long-delayed vogue of Wordsworth and 
Coleridge and the success even of the later schools, of which 
Tennyson was at once the pioneer and the commander-in-chief. 
At an uncertain time in the century, but comparatively early, it 
became fashionable to take Scott's verse as clever and spirited 
improvisation, to dwell on its over-fluency and facility, its lack of 
passages in the grand style (whatever the grand style may be), to 
indicate its frequent blemishes in strictly correct form and phrase. 
And it can hardly be said that there has been much reaction from 
this tone among professed and competent critics. 

To a certain extent, indeed, this undervaluation is justified, 
and Scott himself, who was more free from literary vanity than 
any man of letters of whom we have record, pleaded guilty again 
and again. Dropping as he did almost by accident on a style 
which had absolutely no forerunners in elaborate formal literature, 
a style almost absolutely destitute of any restrictions or limits, in 



74 THE NEW POETRY 



which the length of lines and stanzas, the position of rhymes, the 
change from narrative to dialogue, and so forth, depended wholly 
and solely on the caprice of the author, it would have been 
extremely strange if a man whose education had been a little 
lacking in scholastic strictness, and who began to write at a time 
when the first object of almost every writer was to burst old 
bonds, had not been somewhat lawless, even somewhat slipshod. 
Christabel itself, the first in time, and, though not published till 
long afterwards, the model of his Lay, has but a few score verses 
that can pretend to the grand style (whatever that may be). 
Nor yet again can it be denied that, acute as was the sense 
which bade Scott stop, he wrote as it was a little too much 
in this style, while he tried others for which he had far less 
aptitude. 

Yet it seems to me impossible, on any just theory of poetry or 
of literature, to rank him low as a poet. He can afford to take 
his trial under more than one statute. To those who say that all 
depends on the subject, or that the handling and arrangement of 
the subject are, if not everything, yet something to be ranked far 
above mere detached beauties, he can produce not merely the 
first long narrative poems in English, which for more than a 
century had honestly enthralled and fixed popular taste, but some 
of the very few long narrative poems which deserve to do so. 
Wordsworth, in a characteristic note on the White Doe of 
Rylstone, contrasts, with oblique depreciation of Scott, that poem 
and its famous predecessors in the style across the border ; but he 
omits to notice one point of difference — that in Scott the story 
interests, and in himself it does not. For the belated " classical " 
criticism of the Edinburgh Review, which thought the story of 
the Last Minstrel childish, and that of Marmion not much 
better, it may have been at least consistent to undervalue these 
poems. But the assumptions of that criticism no longer pass 
muster. On the other hand, to those who pin their poetical 
faith on "patches," the great mass of Scott's poetical work 
presents examples of certainly no common beauty. The set 



ii BYRON 75 

pieces of the larger poems, the Melrose description in The 
Lay, the battle in Marmion, the Fiery Cross in the Lady of the 
Lake, are indeed inferior in this respect to the mere snatches 
which the author scattered about his novels, some of which, 
especially the famous " Proud Maisie," have a beauty not inferior 
to that of the best things of his greatest contemporaries. And in 
swinging and dashing lyric, again, Scott can hold his own with 
the best, if indeed " the best " can hold their owa in this particular 
division with " Lochinvar " and " Bonnie Dundee," with Elspeth's 
ballad in the Antiquary, and the White Lady's comfortable words 
to poor Father Philip. 

The most really damaging things to be said against Scott as a 
poet are two. First, that his genius did not incline him either to 
the expression of the highest passion or to that of the deepest 
meditation, in which directions the utterances of the very greatest 
poetry are wont to lie. In the second place, that the extreme 
fertility and fluency which cannot be said to have improved even 
his prose work are, from the nature of the case, far more evident, 
and far more damagingly evident, in his verse. He is a poet of 
description, of action, of narration, rather than of intense feeling 
or thought. Yet in his own special divisions of the simpler lyric 
and of lyrical narrative he sometimes attains the exquisite, and 
rarely sinks below a quality which is fitted to give the poetical 
delight to a very large number of by no means contemptible 
persons. It appears to me at least, that on no sound theory of 
poetical criticism can Scott be ranked as a poet below Byron, who 
was his imitator in narrative and his inferior in lyric. But it may be 
admitted that this was not the opinion of most contemporaries of 
the two, and that, much as the poetry of Byron has sunk in critical 
estimation during the last half century, and slight as are the signs 
of its recovery, those who do not think very highly of the poetry 
of "the pupil do not, as a rule, show much greater enthusiasm for 
that of the master. 

Byron, it is true, was only half a pupil of Scott's, and (oddly 
enough for the poet, who, with Scott, was recognised as leader by 



76 THE NEW POETRY 



the Romantic schools of all Europe) had more than a hankering 
after the classical ideals in literature. Yet how much of this was 
due to wilful "pose" and a desire not to follow the prevailing 
school of the day is a question difficult to answer — as indeed are 
many connected with Byron, whose utterances, even in private 
letters, are very seldom to be taken with absolute confidence 
in their sincerity. The poet's character did no discredit to 
the doctrines of heredity. His family was one of considerable 
distinction and great age ; but his father, Captain John Byron, 
who never came to the title, was a roue of the worst character, 
and the cousin whom the poet succeeded had earned the name 
of the Wicked Lord. His mother, Catherine Gordon of Gight, 
was of an excellent Scotch stock, and an heiress ; though her 
rascally husband made away with her money. But she had a 
most violent temper, and seems to have had absolutely no claims 
except those of birth to the title of lady. Byron was born in 
Holies Street, Cavendish Square, on 22nd January 1788 ; and his 
early youth, which was spent with his mother at Aberdeen, was 
one of not much indulgence or happiness. But he came to the 
title, and to an extremely impoverished succession, at ten years 
old, and three years later was sent to Harrow. Here he made 
many friends, distinguishing himself by obtruding mentions and 
memories of his rank in a way not common with the English 
aristocracy, and hence, in 1805, he proceeded to Trinity 
College, Cambridge. He spent about the usual time there, but 
took no degree, and while he was still an undergraduate printed 
his Hours of Idleness, first called Juvenila. It appeared publicly 
in March 1807, and a year later was the subject of a criticism, 
rather excessive than unjust, in the Edinburgh Review. Byron, 
who had plenty of pluck, and who all his life long inclined in his 
heart to the Popian school, spent a considerable time upon a 
verse-answer, English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, in which he ran 
amuck generally, but displayed ability which it was hopeless to 
seek in his first production. Then he went abroad, and the 
excitement of his sojourn in the countries round the Mediter- 



ii BYRON 77 

ranean for the next two years not only aroused, but finally deter- 
mined and almost fully developed, his genius. 

On his return home he took his seat and went into society 
with the success likely to attend an extremely handsome young 
man of twenty-three, with a vague reputation both for ability and 
naughtiness, a fairly old title, and something of an estate. But 
his position as a "lion" was not thoroughly asserted till the 
publication, in February 1812, of Childe Harold, which with 
some difficulty he had been induced by his friend Dallas, his 
publisher Murray, and the critic Gifford to put before some frigid 
and trivial Hints from Horace. Over Childe Harold the English 
public went simply mad, buying seven editions in five weeks ; and 
during the next three years Byron produced, in rapid succession, 
The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, Lara, The Siege 
of Corinth, and Hebrew Melodies. He could hardly write fast 
enough for the public to buy. Then the day after New Year's 
Day 1 8 14, he married Miss Milbanke, a great heiress, a future 
baroness in her own right, and handsome after a fashion, but of a 
cold, prim, and reserved disposition, as well as of a very unforgiv- 
ing temper. It probably did not surprise any one who knew the 
pair when, a year later, they separated for ever. 

The scandals and discussions connected with this event are 
fortunately foreign to our subject here. The only important result 
of the matter for literature is that Byron (upon whom public 
opinion in one of its sudden fits of virtuous versatility threw even 
more of the blame than was probably just) left the country and 
journeyed leisurely, in the company of Mr. and Mrs. Shelley for 
the most part, to Venice. He never returned alive to England ; 
and Venice, Ravenna, Pisa, and Genoa were successively his head- 
quarters till 1823. Then the Greek Insurrection attracted him, 
he raised what money he could, set out for Greece, showed in the 
distracted counsels of the insurgents much more practical and 
untheatrical heroism than he had hitherto been credited with, and 
died of fever at Missolonghi on the 19th of April 1824. His 
body was brought home to England and buried in the parish 



78 THE NEW POETRY 



church of Hucknall Torkard, near Newstead Abbey, his Notting- 
hamshire seat, which, however, he had sold some time before. 
The best of Byron's poems by far date from this latter period of 
his life : the later cantos of Childe Harold, the beautiful short 
poems of The Dream and Darkness, many pieces in dramatic 
form (the chief of which are Manfred, Cain, Marino Faliero, and 
Sardanapalus) , Mazeppa, a piece more in his earlier style but 
greatly superior to his earlier work, a short burlesque poem 
Beppo, and an immense and at hio death unfinished narrative 
satire entitled Don Juan. 

Although opinions about Byron differ very much, there is one 
point about him which does not admit of difference of opinion. 
No English poet, perhaps no English writer except Scott (or 
rather "The Author of Waverley"), has ever equalled him in 
popularity at home ; and no English writer, with Richardson and 
Scott again as seconds, and those not very close ones, has 
equalled him in contemporary popularity abroad. The vogue of 
Byron in England, though overpowering for the moment, was even 
at its height resisted by some good judges and more strait-laced 
moralists ; and it ebbed, if not as rapidly as it flowed, with a much 
more enduring movement. But abroad he simply took possession 
of the Continent of Europe and kept it. He was one of the 
dominant influences and determining causes of the French 
Romantic movement ; in Germany, though the failure of literary 
talent and activity of the first order in that country early in this 
century made his school less important, he had great power over 
Heine, its one towering genius ; and he was almost the sole 
master of young Russia, young Italy, young Spain, in poetry. 
Nor, though his active and direct influence has of course been 
exhausted by time, can his reputation on the Continent be said 
to have ever waned. 

These various facts, besides being certain in themselves, 
are also very valuable as guiding the inquirer in regions which 
are more of opinion. The rapidity of Byron's success everywhere, 
the extent of it abroad (where few English writers before him had 



BYRON'S POEMS 79 



had any at all), and the decline at home, are all easily connected 
with certain peculiarities of his work. That work is almost as 
fluent and facile as Scott's, to which, as has been said, it owes 
immense debts of scheme and manner ; and it is quite as faulty. 
Indeed Scott, with all his indifference to a strictly academic 
correctness, never permitted himself the bad rhymes, the bad 
grammar, the slipshod phrase in which Byron unblushingly in- 
dulges. But Byron is much more monotonous than Scott, and 
it was this very monotony, assisted by an appearance of intensity, 
which for the time gave him power. The appeal of Byron consists 
very mainly, though no doubt not wholly, in two things : the lavish 
use of the foreign and then unfamiliar scenery, vocabulary, and 
manners of the Levant, and the installation, as principal character, 
of a personage who was speedily recognised as a sort of fancy 
portrait, a sketch in cap and yataghan, of Byron himself as he 
would like to be thought. This Byronic hero has an ostentatious 
indifference to moral laws, for the most part a mysterious past 
which inspires him with deep melancholy, great personal beauty, 
strength, and bravery, and he is an all-conquering lover. He is 
not quite so original as he seemed, for he is in effect very little 
more than the older Romantic villain-hero of Mrs. Radcliffe, the 
Germans, and Monk Lewis, costumed much more effectively, 
placed in scheme and companionship more picturesquely, and 
managed with infinitely greater genius. But it is a common ex- 
perience in literary history that a type more or less familiar 
already, and presented with striking additions, is likely to be 
more popular than something absolutely new. And accordingly 
Byron's bastard and second-hand Romanticism, though it owed 
a great deal to the terrorists and a great deal more to Scott, for 
the moment altogether eclipsed the pure and original Romanticism 
of his elders Coleridge and Wordsworth, of his juniors Shelley 
and Keats. 

But although the more extreme admirers of Byron would no 
doubt dissent strongly from even this judgment, it would probably 
be subscribed, with some reservations and guards, by not a few 



8o THE NEW POETRY 



good critics from whom I am compelled to part company as to 
other parts of Byron's poetical claim. It is on the question how 
much of true poetry lies behind and independent of the scenery 
and properties of Byronism, that the great debate arises. Was 
the author of the poems from Childe Harold to Don Juan really 
gifted with the poetical " sincerity and strength " which have been 
awarded him by a critic of leanings so little Byronic in the ordinary 
sense of Matthew Arnold ? Is he a poetic star of the first magni- 
tude, a poetic force of the first power, at all ? There may seem to 
be rashness, there may even seem to be puerile insolence and 
absurdity, in denying or even doubting this in the face of such a 
European concert as has been described and admitted above. 
Yet the critical conscience admits of no transaction ; and after all, 
as it was doubted by a great thinker whether nations might not 
go mad like individuals, I do not know why it should be regarded 
as impossible that continents should go mad like nations. 

At any rate the qualities of Byron are very much of a piece, 
and, even by the contention of his warmest reasonable admirers, 
not much varied or very subtle, not necessitating much analysis 
or disquisition. They can be fairly pronounced upon in a judg- 
ment of few words. Byron, then, seems to me a poet distinctly of 
the second class, and not even of the best kind of second, inasmuch 
as his greatness is chiefly derived from a sort of parody, a sort of 
imitation, of the qualities of the first. His verse is to the greatest 
poetry what melodrama is to tragedy, what plaster is to marble, 
what pinchbeck is to gold. He is not indeed an impostor ; for 
his sense of the beauty of nature and of the unsatisfactoriness 
of life is real, and his power of conveying this sense to others is 
real also. He has great, though uncertain, and never very fine, 
command of poetic sound, and a considerable though less com- 
mand of poetic vision. But in all this there is a singular touch 
of illusion, of what his contemporaries had learnt from Scott to 
call gramarye. The often cited parallel of the false and true 
Florimels in Spenser applies here also. The really great poets do 
not injure each other in the very least by comparison, different as 



SHELLEY 8 1 



they are. Milton does not " kill " Wordsworth ; Spenser does not 
injure Shelley ; there is no danger in reading Keats immediately 
after Coleridge. But read Byron in close juxtaposition with any 
of these, or with not a few others, and the effect, to any good 
poetic taste, must surely be disastrous ; to my own, whether good 
or bad, it is perfectly fatal. The light is not that which never was 
on land or sea; it is that which is habitually just in front of the 
stage : the roses are rouged, the cries of passion even sometimes 
(not always) ring false. I have read Byron again and again ; I 
have sometimes, by reading Byron only and putting a strong con- 
straint upon myself, got nearly into the mood to enjoy him. But 
let eye or ear once catch sight or sound of real poetry, and the 
enchantment vanishes. 

Attention has already been called to the fact that Byron, 
though generally ranking with the poets who have been placed 
before him in this chapter as a leader in the nineteenth century 
renaissance of poetry, was a direct scholar of Scott, and in point 
of age represented, if not a new generation, a second division of 
the old. This was still more the case in point of age, and almost 
infinitely more so in point of quality, as regards Shelley and Keats. 
There was nothing really new in Byron ; there was only a great 
personal force directing itself, half involuntarily and more than 
half because of personal lack of initiative, into contemporary ways. 
The other 'two poets just mentioned were really new powers. 
They took some colour from their elders ; but they added more 
than they took, and they would unquestionably have been great 
figures at any time of English literature and history. Scott had 
little or no influence on them, and Wordsworth not much ; but 
they were rather close to Coleridge, and they owed something to 
a poet of much less genius than his or than their own — Leigh 
Hunt. 

Percy Bysshe Shelley, the elder of the two, was Byron's junior 
by four years, and was born at Field Place in Sussex in August 
1792. He was the heir of a very respectable and ancient 
though not very distinguished family of the squirearchy ; and he 



82 THE NEW POETRY 



had every advantage of education, being sent to Eton in 1804, 
and to University College, Oxford, six years later. The un- 
conquerable unconventionality of his character and his literary 
tastes had shown themselves while he was still a schoolboy, and 
in the last year of his Etonian and the first of his Oxonian 
residence he published two of the most absurd novels of the 
most absurd novel kind that ever appeared, Zastrozzi and St. 
Irvyne, imitations of Monk Lewis. He also in the same year 
collaborated in two volumes of verse, The Wandering Jew (partly 
represented by Queen Mai?), and "Poems by Victor and Cazire " 
(which has vindicated the existence of reviewers by surviving only 
in its reviews, all copies having mysteriously perished) . His stay 
at Oxford was not long ; for having, in conjunction with a clever 
but rather worthless friend, Thomas Jefferson Hogg (afterwards 
his biographer), issued a pamphlet on "The Necessity of Athe- 
ism " and sent it to the heads of colleges, he was, by a much 
greater necessity, expelled from University on 25th March 181 1. 
Later in the same year he married Harriet Westbrook, a pretty 
and lively girl of sixteen, who had been a school-fellow of his 
sister's, but came from the lower middle class. His apologists 
have said that Harriet threw herself at his head, and that Shelley 
explained to her that she or he might depart when either pleased. 
The responsibility and the validity of this defence may be left to 
these advocates. 

For nearly three years Shelley and his wife led an exceedingly 
wandering life in Ireland, Wales, Devonshire, Berkshire, the Lake 
District, and elsewhere, Shelley attempting all sorts of eccentric 
propagandism in politics and religion, and completing the crude but 
absolutely original Queen Mab. Before the third anniversary of his 
wedding-day came round he had parted with Harriet, against 
whose character his apologists, as above, have attempted to 
bring charges. The fact is that he had fallen in love with Mary 
Godwin, daughter of the author of Political Justice (whose writings 
had always had a great influence on Shelley, and who spunged on 
him pitilessly) and of Mary Wollstonecraft. The pair fled to 



ii SHELLEY 83 

the Continent together in July 1814; and two years later, when 
the unhappy wife, a girl of twenty-one, had drowned herself in the 
Serpentine, they were married. Meanwhile Shelley had wandered 
back to England, had, owing to the death of his grandfather, 
received a considerable independent income by arrangement, and 
in 1 815 had written Alastor, which, though not so clearly indica- 
tive of a new departure when compared with Queen Mab as some 
critics have tried to make out, no other living poet, perhaps no 
other poet, could have written. He was refused the guardianship, 
though he was allowed to appoint guardians, of his children by 
the luckless Harriet, and was (for him naturally, though for most 
men unreasonably) indignant. But his poetical vocation and 
course were both clear henceforward, though he never during his 
life had much command of the public, and had frequent difficul- 
ties with publishers, while the then attitude of the law made piracy 
very easy. For a time he lived at Marlow, where he wrote or 
began Prince Athanase, Rosalind and Helen, and above all Laon 
and Cythna, called later and permanently The Revolt of Islam. 
In April 1818 he left England for Italy, and never returned. 

The short remains of his life were spent chiefly at Lucca, 
Florence, and Pisa, with visits to most of the other chief Italian 
cities ; Byron being often, and Leigh Hunt at the last, his com- 
panion. All his greatest poems were now written. At last, in 
July 182 1, when the Shelleys were staying at a lonely house named 
Casa Magni, on the Bay of Spezia, he and his friend Lieutenant 
Williams set out in a boat from Leghorn. The boat either 
foundered in a squall or was run down. At any rate Shelley's 
body was washed ashore on the 19th, and burnt on a pyre in the 
presence of Byron, Hunt, and Trelawny. 

Little need be said of Shelley's character. If it had not been 
for the disgusting efforts of his maladroit adorers to blacken 
that not merely of his hapless young wife, but of every one with 
whom he came in contact, it might be treated with the extremest 
indulgence. Almost a boy in years at the time of his death, he 
was, with some late flashes of sobering, wholly a boy in inability 



84 THE NEW POETRY 



to understand the responsibilities and the burdens of life. An 
enthusiast for humanity generally, and towards individuals a man 
of infinite generosity and kindliness, he yet did some of the 
cruellest and some of not the least disgraceful things from mere 
childish want of realising the pacta conventa of the world. He, 
wholly ignorant, would, if he could, have turned the wheel of soci- 
ety the other way, reckless of the horrible confusion and suffering 
that he must occasion. 

But in pure literary estimation we need take no note of this. 
In literature, Shelley, if not of the first three or four, is certainly 
of the first ten or twelve. He has, as no poet in England except 
Blake and Coleridge in a few flashes had had before him for some 
century and a half, the ineffable, the divine intoxication which only 
the di majores of poetry can communicate to their worshippers. 
Once again, after all these generations, it became unnecessary to 
agree or disagree with the substance, to take interest or not to 
take interest in it, to admit or to contest the presence of faults 
and blemishes — to do anything except recognise and submit to 
the strong pleasure of poetry, the charm of the highest poetical 
inspiration. 

I think myself, though the opinion is not common among 
critics, that this touch is unmistakable even so early as Queen 
Mab. That poem is no doubt to a certain extent modelled upon 
Southey, especially upon Kehama, which, as has been observed 
above, is a far greater poem than is usually allowed. But the 
motive was different : the sails might be the same, but the wind 
that impelled them was another. By the time of Alastor it is 
generally admitted that there could or should have been little 
mistake. Nothing, indeed, but the deafening blare of Byron's 
brazen trumpet could have silenced this music of the spheres. 
The meaning is not very much, though it is passable ; but the 
music is exquisite. There is just a foundation of Wordsworthian 
scheme in the blank verse ; but the structure built on it is not 
Wordsworth's at all, and there are merely a few borrowed strokes 
of technique, such as the placing of a long adjective before a 



ii SHELLEY 85 

monosyllabic noun at the end of the line, and a strong caesura 
about two-thirds through that line. All the rest is Shelley, and 
wonderful. 

It may be questioned whether, fine as The Revolt of Islam 
is, the Spenserian stanza was quite so well suited as the " Pin- 
daric "or as blank verse, or as lyrical measures, to Shelley's 
genius. It is certainly far excelled both in the lyrics and in the 
blank verse of Prometheus Unbound, the first poem which dis- 
tinctly showed that one of the greatest lyric poets of the world 
had been born to England. The Cenci relies more on subject, 
and, abandoning the lyric appeal, abandons what Shelley is 
strongest in ; but Hellas restores this. Of his comic efforts, 
the chief of which are Swellfoot the Tyrant and Peter Bell the 
Third, it is perhaps enough to say that his humour, though it 
existed, was fitful, and that he was too much of a partisan to 
keep sufficiently above his theme. The poems midway between, 
large and small — Prince Athanase, The Witch of Atlas (an 
exquisite and glorious fantasy piece), Rosalind and Helen, 
Adonian Epipsychidion, and the Triumph of Life — would alone 
have made his fame. But it is in Shelley's smallest poems that 
his greatest virtue lies. Not even in the seventeenth century had 
any writer given so much that was so purely exquisite. "To 
Constantia Singing," the "Ozymandias" sonnet, the "Lines 
written among the Euganean Hills," the "Stanzas written in 
Dejection," the "Ode to the West Wind," the hackneyed "Cloud," 
and "Skylark," "Arethusa," the "World's Wanderers," "Music, 
when soft voices die," "The flower that smiles to-day," "Rarely, 
rarely, comest thou," the "Lament," "One word is too often 
profaned," the "Indian Air," the second "Lament," "O world! 
O life ! O time ! " (the most perfect thing of its kind perhaps, 
in the strict sense of perfection, that all poetry contains), the 
"Invitation," and the "Recollection," — this long list, which might 
have been made longer, contains things absolutely consummate, 
absolutely unsurpassed, only rivalled by a few other things as 
perfect as themselves. 



86 THE NEW POETRY 



Shelley has been foolishly praised, and it is very likely that 
the praise given here may seem to some foolish. It is as hard 
for praise to keep the law of the head as for blame to keep the 
law of the heart. He has been mischievously and tastelessly 
excused for errors both in and out of his writings which need 
only a kindly silence. In irritation at the "chatter" over him 
some have even tried to make out that his prose — very fine 
prose indeed, and preserved to us in some welcome letters and 
miscellaneous treatises, but capable of being dispensed with — is 
more worthy of attention than his verse, which has no parallel 
and few peers. But that one thing will remain true in the 
general estimate of competent posterity I have no doubt. There 
are two English poets, and two only, in whom the purely poetical 
attraction, exclusive of and sufficient without all others, is supreme, 
and these two are Spenser and Shelley. 

The life of John Keats was even shorter and even less marked 
by striking events than that of Shelley, and he belonged in point 
of extraction and education to a somewhat lower class of society 
than any of the poets hitherto mentioned in this chapter. He 
was the son of a livery stable keeper who was fairly well off, and he 
went to no school but a private one, where, however, he received 
tolerable instruction and had good comrades. Born in 1795, 
he was apprenticed to a surgeon at the age of fifteen, and even 
did some work in his profession, till in 181 7 his overmastering 
passion for literature had its way. He became intimate with the 
so-called "Cockney school," or rather with its leaders Leigh 
Hunt and Hazlitt — an intimacy, as far as the former was con- 
cerned, not likely to chasten his own taste, but chiefly un- 
fortunate because it led, in the rancorous state of criticism then 
existing, to his own efforts being branded with the same epithet. 
His first book was published in the year above mentioned : it 
did not contain all the verse he had written up to that time, or 
the best of it, but it confirmed him in his vocation. He broke 
away from surgery, and, having some little means, travelled to the 
Isle of Wight, Devonshire, and other parts of England, besides 



ii KEATS 87 

becoming more and more familiar with men of letters. It was in 
the Isle of Wight chiefly that he wrote Endymion, which appeared 
in 18 18. This was savagely and stupidly attacked in Black- 
wood and the Quarterly ; the former article being by some attri- 
buted, without a tittle of evidence, to Lockhart. But the supposed 
effect of these attacks on Keats' health was widely exaggerated 
by some contemporaries, especially by Byron. The fact was 
that he had almost from his childhood shown symptoms of lung 
disease, which developed itself very rapidly. The sense of his 
almost certain fate combined with the ordinary effects of passion 
to throw a somewhat hectic air over his correspondence with 
Miss Fanny Brawne. His letters to her contain nothing dis- 
creditable to him, but ought never to have been published. He 
was, however, to bring out his third and greatest book of verse 
in 1820; and then he sailed for Italy, to die on the 23rd of 
February 182 1. He spoke of his name as "writ in water." 
Posterity has agreed with him that it is — but in the Water of 
Life. 

Nothing is more interesting, even in the endless and delight- 
ful task of literary comparison, than to contrast the work of 
Shelley and Keats, so alike and yet so different. A little longer 
space of work, much greater advantages of means and education, 
and a happier though less blameless experience of passion, enabled 
Shelley to produce a much larger body of work than Keats has 
to his name, even when this is swollen by what Mr. Palgrave 
has justly stigmatised as " the incomplete and inferior work " with- 
held by Keats himself, but made public by the cruel kindness 
of admirers. And this difference in bulk probably coincides 
with a difference in the volume of genius of the two writers. 
Further, while it is not at all improbable that if Shelley had 
lived he would have gone on writing better and better, the 
same probability is, I think, to be more sparingly predicated 
of Keats. 

On the other hand, by a not uncommon connection or 
consequence, Keats has proved much more of a "germinal" 



88 THE NEW POETRY 



poet than Shelley. Although the latter was, I think, by far the 
greater, his poetry had little that was national and very little that 
was imitable about it. He has had a vast influence ; but it has 
been in the main the influence, the inspiration of his unsurpassed 
exciting power. No one ha* borrowed or carried further any 
specially Shelleian turns of phrase, rhythm, or thought. Those 
who have attempted to copy and urge further the Shelleian 
attitude towards politics, philosophy, ethics, and the like, have 
made it generally ludicrous and sometimes disgusting. He is, 
in his own famous words, "something remote and afar." His 
poetry is almost poetry in its elements, uncoloured by race, 
language, time, circumstance, or creed. He is not even so 
much a poet as Poetry accidentally impersonated and in- 
carnate. 

With Keats it is very different. He had scarcely reached 
maturity of any kind when he died, and he laboured under the 
very serious disadvantages, first of an insufficient acquaintance 
with the great masters, and secondly of coining early under the 
influence of a rather small master, yet a master, Leigh Hunt, 
who taught him the fluent, gushing, slipshod style that brought 
not merely upon him, but upon his mighty successor Tennyson, 
the harsh but not in this respect wholly unjust lash of con- 
servative and academic criticism. But he, as no one of his own 
contemporaries did, felt, expressed, and handed on the exact 
change wrought in English poetry by the great Romantic move- 
ment. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Scott, and even Southey to 
some extent, were the authors of this ; but, being the authors, 
they were necessarily not the results of it. Byron was funda- 
mentally out of sympathy with it, though by accidents of time 
and chance he had to enlist ; Shelley, an angel, and an effectual 
angel, of poetry, was hardly a man, and still less an Englishman. 
But Keats felt it all, expressed what of it he had time and 
strength to express, and left the rest to his successors, helped, 
guided, furthered by his own example. Keats, in short, is the 
father, directly or at short stages of descent, of every English poet 



ii KEATS 89 

born within the present century who has not been a mere 
" sport " or exception. He begat Tennyson, and Tennyson 
begat all the rest. 

The evidences of this are to be seen in almost his earliest 
poems — not necessarily in those contained in his earliest volume. 
Of course they are not everywhere. There were sure to be, 
and there were, mere echoes of eighteenth century verse and 
mere imitations of earlier writers. But these may be simply 
neglected. It is in such pieces as " Calidore " that the new note 
is heard ; and though something in this note may be due to Hunt 
(who had caught the original of it from Wither and Browne), 
Keats changed, enriched, and refashioned the thing to such an 
extent that it became his own. It is less apparent (though 
perhaps not less really present) in his sonnets, despite the mag- 
nificence of the famous one on Chapman's Homer, than in the 
couplet poems, which are written in an extremely fluent and 
peculiar verse, very much "enjambed" or overlapped, and with 
a frequent indulgence in double rhymes. Hunt had to a cer- 
tain extent started this, but he had not succeeded in giving 
it anything like the distinct character which it took in Keats' 
hands. 

Endymion was written in this measure, with rare breaks ; and 
there is little doubt that the lusciousness of the rhythm, combined 
as it was with a certain lusciousness both of subject and (again 
in unlucky imitation of Hunt) of handling, had a bad effect on 
some readers, as also that the attacks on it -were to a certain 
extent, though not a very large one, prompted by genuine disgust 
at the mawkishness, as its author called it, of the tone. Keats, who 
was always an admirable critic of his own work, judged it correctly 
enough later, except that he was too harsh to it. But it is a 
delightful poem to this day, and I do think that it is quite just to 
call it, as it has been called, "not Greek, but Elizabethan-Ro- 
mantic." It seems to me quite different from Marlowe or the 
author of Britain's Ida, and really Greek, but Greek mediseval, 
Greek of the late romance type, refreshed with a wonderful new 



9Q THE NEW POETRY 



blood of English romanticism. And this once more was to be the 
note of all the best poetry of the century, the pouring of this 
new English blood through the veins of old subjects — classical, 
mediaeval, foreign, modern. We were to conquer the whole 
world of poetical matter with our English armies, and Keats was 
the first leader who started the adventure. 

The exquisite poetry of his later work showed this general 
tendency in all its latest pieces, — clearly in the larger poems, the 
fine but perhaps somewhat overpraised Hyperion, the admirable 
La/nia, the exquisite Eve of St. Agnes, but still more in the smaller, 
and most of all in those twin peaks of all his poetry, the " Ode 
on a Grecian Urn " and " La Belle Dame sans Merci." He need 
indeed have written nothing but these two to show himself not 
merely an exquisite poet but a captain and leader of English 
poetry for many a year, almost for many a generation to come. 
Wordsworth may have given him a little, a very quiet hint for the 
first, the more Classical masterpiece ; Coleridge something a little 
louder for the second, the Romantic. But in neither case did the 
summons amount to anything like a cue or a call-bell ; it was at 
best seed that, if it had not fallen on fresh and fruitful soil, could 
have come to nothing. 

As it is, and if we wish to see what it came to, we must simply 
look at the whole later poetry of the nineteenth century in 
England. The operations of the spirit are not to be limited, and 
it is of course quite possible that if Keats had not been, something 
or somebody would have done his work instead of him. But as 
it is, it is to Keats that we must trace Tennyson, Rossetti, Mr. 
Swinburne, Mr. Morris ; to Keats that even not a little of Brown- 
ing has to be affiliated ; to Keats, directly or indirectly, that the 
greater part of the poetry of nearly three generations owes royalty 
and allegiance. 

Of him, as of Shelley, some foolish and hurtful things have 
been said. In life he was no effeminate " aesthetic " or " decadent," 
divided between sensual gratification and unmanly Katzenjanimer, 
between paganism and puerility, but an honest, manly Englishman, 



n ROGERS 91 

whose strength only yielded to unconquerable disease, whose 
impulses were always healthy and generous. Despite his origin, — 
and, it must be added, some of his friendships, — there was not a 
touch of vulgarity about him ; and if his comic vein was not very 
full-pulsed, he had a merry laugh in him. There is no " poisonous 
honey stolen" from anywhere or extracted by himself from anything 
in Keats ; his sensuousness is nothing more than is, in the circum- 
stances, "necessary and voluptuous and right." But these moral 
excellences, while they may add to the satisfaction with which 
one contemplates him, hardly enhance — though his morbid ad- 
mirers seem to think that the absence of them would enhance — 
the greatness and the value of his poetical position, both in the 
elaboration of a new poetic style and language, and still more in 
the indication of a new road whereby the great poetic exploration 
could be carried on. 

Round or under these great Seven — for that Byron was great 
in a way need not be denied ; Southey, the weakest of all as a 
poet, had a very strong influence, and was one of the very greatest 
of English men of letters — must be mentioned a not incon- 
siderable number of men who in any other age would have been 
reckoned great. The eldest of these, both in years and in repu- 
tation, holds his position, and perhaps always held it, rather by 
courtesy than by strict right. Samuel Rogers 1 was born in London 
on 30th July 1 763, and was the son of a dissenting banker, from 
whom he derived Whig principles and a comfortable fortune. It 
is said that he once, as a very young man, went to call on Dr. 
Johnson, but was afraid to knock ; but though shyness accom- 
panied him through life, the amiability which it is sometimes 
supposed to betoken did not. He published a volume of poems 
in 1786, and his famous Pleasures of Memory, the piece that 

1 Curiously enough, there was another and slightly older Samuel Rogers, a 
clergyman, who published verse in 1782, just before his' namesake, and who dealt 
with Hope — 

Hope springs eternal in the aspiring breast. 

His verse, of which specimens are given in Southey's Modern English Poets, is 
purely eighteenth century. He died in 1790. 



92 THE NEW POETRY 



made his reputation, in 1792. Twenty years afterwards Columbus 
followed, and yet two years later, in 18 14, Jacqueline ; while in 
1822 Italy, on which, with the Pleasures of Memory, such fame as 
he has rests, was published, to be reissued some years afterwards 
in a magnificent illustrated edition, and to have a chance (in a 
classical French jest) se sauver de plane he en planche. He did not 
die till 1855, in his ninety- third year : the last, as he had been the 
first, of his group. 

Rogers had the good luck to publish his best piece at a time 
when the general and popular level of English poetry was at the 
lowest point it has reached since the sixteenth century, and to be 
for many years afterwards a rich and rather hospitable man, the 
acquaintance if not exactly the friend of most men of letters, of 
considerable influence in political and general society, and master 
of an excessively sharp tongue. A useful friend and a dangerous 
enemy, it was simpler to court or to let him alone than to attack 
him, and his fame was derived from pieces too different from any 
work of the actual generation to give them much umbrage. It 
may be questioned whether Rogers ever wrote a single line of 
poetry. But he wrote some polished and pleasant verse, which 
was vigorous by the side of Hayley and " correct " by the side of 
Keats. In literature he has very little interest ; in literary history 
he has some. 

Felix opportunitate in the same way, but a far greater poet, 
was Thomas Campbell, who, like Rogers, was a Whig, like him 
belonged rather to the classical than to the romantic school in style 
if not in choice of subject, and like him had the good luck to 
obtain, by a poem with a title very similar to that of Rogers' 
masterpiece, a high reputation at a time when there was very little 
poetry put before the public. Campbell was not nearly so old a man 
as Rogers, and was even the junior of the Lake poets and Scott, 
having been born at Glasgow on the 2 7th July 1777. His father was 
a real Campbell, and as a merchant had at one time been of some 
fortune ; but the American War had impoverished him, and the 
poet was born to comparative indigence. He did, however, well 



CAMPBELL 93 



at the college of his native city, and on leaving it took a tutorship 
in Mull. His Pleasures of Hope was published in 1 799 and was 
extremely popular, nor after it had its author much difficulty in 
following literature. He was never exactly rich, but pensions, 
legacies, editorships, high prices for his not extensive poetical 
work, and higher for certain exercises in prose bookmaking which 
are now almost forgotten, maintained him very comfortably. 
Indeed, of the many recorded ingratitudes of authors to publishers, 
Campbell's celebrated health to Napoleon because " he shot a 
bookseller " is one of the most ungrateful. In the last year of the 
eighteenth century he went to Germany, and was present at (or in 
the close neighbourhood of) the battle of Hohenlinden. This 
he afterwards celebrated in really immortal verse, which, with "Ye 
Mariners of England " and the " Battle of the Baltic," represents 
his greatest achievement. In 1809 he published Gertrude of 
Wyoming, a short-long poem of respectable technique and graceful 
sentiment. In 1824 appeared a volume of poems, of which the 
chief, Theodric (not as it is constantly misspelled The odoric) , is bad ; 
and in 1842 another, of which the chief, The Pilgrim of Glencoe, 
is worse. He died in 1844 at Boulogne, after a life which, if not 
entirely happy (for he had ill-health, not improved by incautious 
habits, some domestic misfortunes, and a rather sour disposition), 
had been full of honours of all kinds, both in his own country, 
of where he was Lord Rector of Glasgow University, and out 
of it. 

If Campbell had written nothing but his longer poems, the 
comparison above made with Rogers would be wholly, instead of 
partly, justified. Although both still retain a sort of conventional 
respect, it is impossible to call either the Pleasures of Hope or 
Gertrude of Wyoming very good poetry, while enough has been 
said of their successors. Nor can very high praise be given to 
most of the minor pieces. But the three splendid war-songs above 
named — the equals, if not the superiors, of anything of the kind in 
English, and therefore in any language — set him in a position 
from which he is never likely to be ousted. In a handful of 



94 THE NEW POETRY chap. 

others — " Lochiel," the exquisite lines on "A Deserted Garden 
in Argyleshire," with, for some flashes at least, the rather over- 
famed "Exile of Erin," " Lord Ullin's Daughter," and a few more 
— he also displays very high, though rather unequal and by no 
means unalloyed, poetical faculty; and "The Last Man," which, 
by the way, is the latest of his good things, is not the least. But 
his best work will go into a very small compass : a single octavo 
sheet would very nearly hold it, and it was almost all written before 
he was thirty. He is thus an instance of a kind of poet, not by any 
means rare in literature, but also not very common, who appears 
to have a faculty distinct in class but not great in volume, who 
can do certain things better than almost anybody else, but cannot 
do them very often, and is not quite to be trusted to do them 
with complete sureness of touch. For it is to be noted that even 
in Campbell's greatest things there are distinct blemishes, and 
that these blemishes are greatest in that which in its best parts 
reaches the highest level — " The Battle of the Baltic." Many 
third and some tenth rate poets would never have left in their 
work such things as " The might of England flushed To anticipate 
the seene," which is half fustian and half nonsense : no very great 
poet could possibly have been guilty of it. Yet for all this 
Campbell holds, as has been said, the place of best singer of war 
in a race and language which are those of the best singers and 
not the worst fighters in the history of the world — in the race of 
Nelson and the language of Shakespeare. Not easily shall a man 
win higher praise than this. 

In politics, as well as in a certain general kind of literary 
attitude and school, another Thomas, Moore, classes himself 
both historically and naturally with Rogers and Campbell ; but he 
was a very much better poet than Rogers, and, though he never 
reached quite the same height as Campbell at his narrow and 
exceptional best, a far more voluminous verse writer and a much 
freer writer of good verse of many different kinds. He was born 
in Dublin on 28th May 1779 ; his father being a grocer, his mother 
somewhat higher in social rank. He was well educated, and was 



II MOORE 95 

sent to Trinity College, Dublin, where he had but surmounted 
political difficulties ; for his time as an undergraduate coincided 
with "Ninety-eight," and though it does not seem that he had 
meddled with anything distinctly treasonable, he had " National- 
ist " friends and leanings. Partly to sever inconvenient associa- 
tions, partly in quest of fortune, he was sent to London in that 
year, and entered at the Temple. In a manner not very clearly 
explained, but connected no doubt with his leaning to the Whig 
party, which was then much in need of literary help, he became a 
protege of Lord Moira's, by whom he was introduced to the 
Prince of Wales. The Prince accepted the dedication of some 
translations of Anacreon, etc., which Moore had brought over 
with him, and which were published in 1800; while two years 
later the Poems of Thomas Little, a punning pseudonym, appeared, 
and at once charmed the public by their sugared versification 
and shocked it by their looseness of tone — a looseness which is 
not to be judged from the comparatively decorous appearance 
they make in modern editions. But there was never much harm 
in them. Next year, in 1803, Moore received a valuable appoint- 
ment at Bermuda, which, though he actually went out to take 
possession of it and travelled some time in North America, he 
was allowed to transfer to a deputy. He came back to England, 
published another volume of poems, and fought a rather famously 
futile duel with Jeffrey about a criticism on it in the Edinburgh 
Review. He began the Irish Melodies in 1807, married four years 
later, and from that time fixed his headquarters mostly in the 
country : first near Ashbourne in Derbyshire, then near Devizes in 
Wiltshire, to be near his patrons Lord Moira and Lord Lans- 
downe. But he was constantly in London on visits, and much in 
the society of men of letters, not merely of his own party. In 
particular he became, on the whole, Byron's most intimate friend, 
and preserved towards that very difficult person an attitude 
(tinged neither with the servility nor with the exaggerated inde- 
pendence of the parvenu) which did him a great deal of credit. 
He was rather a strong partisan, and, having a brilliant vein of 



96 THE NEW POETRY 



poetical satire, he wrote in 1 8 1 3 The Twopenny Post Bag — the 
best satiric verse of the poetical kind since the Anti-Jacobin, and 
the best on the Whig side since the Rolliad. 

Nor did he fail to take advantage of the popular appetite for 
long poems which Scott and Byron had created ; his Lalla Rookh, 
published in 181 7, being very popular and very profitable. It 
was succeeded by another and his best satirical work, The Fudge 
Family, a charming thing. 

Up to this time he had been an exceedingly fortunate man ; and 
his good luck, aided it must be said by his good conduct, — for 
Moore, with all his apparent weaknesses, was thoroughly sound at 
the core, — enabled him to surmount a very serious reverse of 
fortune. His Bermuda deputy was guilty of malversation so 
considerable that Moore could not meet the debt, and he had to 
go abroad. But Lord Lansdowne discharged his obligations ; and 
Moore paid Lord Lansdowne. He returned to England in 1823, 
and was a busy writer for all but the last years of the thirty that 
remained to him ; but the best of his work was done, with one 
exception. Byron left him his Memoirs, which would of course 
have been enormously profitable. But Lady Byron and others of 
the poet's connections were so horrified at the idea of the book 
appearing that, by an arrangement which has been variously 
judged, but which can hardly be regarded as other than dis- 
interested on Moore's part, the MS. was destroyed, and 
instead of it Moore brought out in 1830 his well-known Life of 
Byron. This, some not incompetent judges have regarded 
as ranking next to Lockhart's Scott and Boswell's Johnson, and 
though its main attraction may be derived from Byron's very 
remarkable letters, still shows on the part of the biographer very 
unusual dexterity, good feeling, and taste. The lives of Sheridan 
and Lord Edward Fitzgerald had, and deserved to have, less 
success ; while a History of Ireland was, and was bound to be, an 
almost complete failure. For, though a very good prose writer, 
Moore had little of the erudition required, no grasp or faculty of 
political argument, and was at this time of his life, if not earlier, 



MOORE 



97 



something of a trimmer, certain to satisfy neither the "ascendency" 
nor the " nationalist " parties. His prose romance of The Epi- 
curean is much better, and a really remarkable, piece of work ; 
and though the Loves of the Angels, his last long poem, is not very 
good, he did not lose his command either of sentimental or of 
facetious lyric till quite his last days. These were clouded ; for, 
like his contemporaries Scott and Southey, he suffered from brain 
disease for some time before his death, on 25th February 1852. 

During his lifetime, especially during the first half or two-thirds 
of his literary career, Moore had a great popularity, and won no 
small esteem even among critics ; such discredit as attached to 
him being chiefly of the moral kind, and that entertained only by 
very strait-laced persons. But as the more high-flown and im- 
passioned muses of Wordsworth, of Shelley, and of Keats gained 
the public ear in the third and later decades of the century, a 
fashion set in of regarding him as a mere melodious trifler ; and 
this has accentuated itself during the last twenty years or so, 
though quite recently some efforts have been made in protest. 
This estimate is demonstrably unjust. It is true that of the 
strange and high notes of poetry he has very few, of the very 
strangest and highest none at all. But his long poems, Latta 
Rookli especially, though somewhat over-burdened with the then 
fashionable deck cargo of erudite or would-be erudite notes, 
possess merit which none but a very prejudiced critic can, or at 
least ought to, overlook. And in other respects he is very nearly, 
if not quite, at the top of at least two trees, which, if not quite 
cedars of Lebanon, are not mere grass of Parnassus. Moore 
was a born as well as a trained musician. But whereas most 
musicians have since the seventeenth century been exceedingly 
ill at verbal numbers, he had a quite extraordinary knack of 
composing what are rather disrespectfully called "words." Among 
his innumerable songs there are not one or two dozens or scores, 
but almost hundreds of quite charmingly melodious things, 
admirably adjusted to their music, and delightful by themselves 
without any kind of instrument, and as said not sung. And, what 

H 



9 8 THE NEW POETRY 



is more, among these there is a very respectable number to which 
it would be absolutely absurd to give the name of trifle. " I saw 
from the beach " is not a trifle, nor "When in death I shall calm 
recline," nor " Oft in the stilly night," nor "Tell me, kind sage, I 
pray thee," nor many others. They have become so hackneyed to 
us in various ways, and some of them happen to be pitched in a key 
of diction which, though not better or worse than others, is so out 
of fashion, that it seems as if some very respectable judges could 
not " focus " Moore at all. To those who can he will seem, not 
of course the equal, or anything like the equal, of Burns or Shelley, 
of Blake or Keats, but in his own way, — and that a way legitimate 
and not low, — one of the first lyrical writers in English. And 
they will admit a considerable addition to his claims in his 
delightful satirical verse, mainly but not in the least offensively 
political, in which kind he is as easily first as in the sentimental 
song to music. 

Something not dissimilar to the position which Moore occupies 
on the more classical wing of the poets of the period is occupied 
on the other by Leigh Hunt. Hunt (Henry James Leigh, who 
called himself and is generally known by the third only of his 
Christian names) was born in London on the 19th October 1784, 
was educated at Christ's Hospital, began writing very early, held 
for a short time a clerkship in a public office, and then joined his 
brother in conducting the Examiner newspaper. Fined and 
imprisoned for a personal libel on the Prince Regent (18 12), 
Hunt became the fashion with the Opposition ; and the Siory of 
Rimini, which he published when he came out of gaol, and which 
was written in it, had a good deal of influence. He spent some 
years in Italy, to which place he had gone with his family in 1822 
to edit The Liberal 'and to keep house with Byron — a very disastrous 
experiment, the results of which he recorded in an offensive book 
on his return. Hunt lived to 18th August 1859, and was rescued 
from the chronic state of impecuniosity in which, despite constant 
literary work, he had long lived, by a Crown pension and some 
other assistance in his latest days. Personally, Leigh Hunt was 



li LEIGH HUNT — HOGG 99 

an agreeable and amiable being enough, with certain foibles 
which were rather unfairly magnified in the famous caricature of 
him as Harold Skimpole by his friend Dickens, but which were 
accompanied by some faults of taste of which Mr. Skimpole is 
not accused. 

In letters he was a very considerable person ; though the best 
and far the largest part of his work is in prose, and will be 
noticed hereafter. His verse is not great in bulk, and is perhaps 
more original and stimulating than positively good. His wide and 
ardent study of the older English poets and of those of Italy 
had enabled him to hit on a novel style of phrase and rhythm, 
which has been partly referred to above in the notice of Keats ; 
his narrative faculty was strong, and some of his smaller pieces, 
from his sonnets downwards, are delightful things. " Abou ben 
Adhem " unites (a rare thing for its author) amiability with 
dignity, stateliness with ease ; the " Nile " sonnet is splendid ; 
"Jenny kissed me," charming, if not faultless; "The Man and 
the Fish," far above vulgarity. The lack of delicate taste which 
characterised his manners also marred his verse, which is not 
unfrequently slipshod, or gushing, or trivially fluent, and perhaps 
never relatively so good as the best of his prose. But he owed 
little to any but the old masters, and many contemporaries owed 
not a little to him. 

A quaint and interesting if not supremely important figure 
among the poets of this period, and, if his poetry and prose be 
taken together, a very considerable man of letters, — perhaps the 
most considerable man of letters in English who was almost 
totally uneducated, — was James Hogg, who was born in Ettrick 
Forest in the year 1772. He was taken from school to mind 
sheep so early that much later he had to teach himself even 
reading and writing afresh ; and, though he must have had the 
song-gift early, it was not till he was nearly thirty that he pub- 
lished anything. He was discovered by Scott, to whom he and 
his mother supplied a good deal of matter for the Border 
Minstrelsy, and he published again in 1803. The rest of his life 



THE NEW POETRY 



was divided between writing — with fair success, though with some 
ill-luck from bankrupt publishers — and sheep-farming, on which he 
constantly lost, though latterly he sat rent free under the Duke of 
Buccleuch. He died on 21st November 1835. 

Even during his life Hogg underwent a curious process of 
mythopceia at the hands of Wilson and the other wits of Black- 
wood's Magazine, who made him — partly with his own consent, 
partly not — into the famous " Ettrick Shepherd" of the Nodes 
Ambrostance. " The Shepherd " has Hogg's exterior features and 
a good many of his foibles, but is endowed with considerably 
more than his genius. Even in his published and acknowledged 
works, which are numerous, it is not always quite easy to be sure 
of his authorship ; for he constantly solicited, frequently received, 
and sometimes took without asking, assistance from Lockhart 
and others. But enough remains that is different from the work 
of any of his known or possible coadjutors to enable us to distin- 
guish his idiosyncrasy pretty well. In verse he was a very fluent 
and an exceedingly unequal writer, who in his long poems chief! v, 
and not too happily, followed Scott, but who in the fairy poem of 
" Kilmeny " displayed an extraordinary command of a rare form of 
poetry, and who has written some dozens of the best songs in the 
language. The best, but only a few of the best, of these are 
"Donald Macdonald," "Donald M'Gillavry," "The Village of 
Balmanhapple," and the "Boy's Song." In prose he chiefly 
attempted novels, which have no construction at all, and few 
merits of dialogue or style, but contain some powerful passages ; 
while one of them, The Confessions of a Justified Sinner, if it is 
entirely his, which is very doubtful, is by far the greatest thing he 
wrote, being a story of diablerie very well designed, wonderfully 
fresh and enthralling in detail, and kept up with hardly a slip to 
the end. His other chief prose works are entitled The Brownie 
of Bodsbeck, The Three Perils of Man, The Three Perils of 
Woman, and Altrive Tales, while he also wrote some important, 
and in parts very offensive, but also in parts amusing, Recollections 
of Sir Walter Scott. His verse volumes, no one of which is 



LANDOR 



good throughout, though hardly one is without good things, were 
The Mountain Bard, The Queen's Wake, Mador of the Moor, The 
Pilgrims of the Sun, Jacobite Relics (some of the best forged by 
himself) , Queen Hynde, and The Border Garland. 

A greater writer, if his work be taken as a whole, than any 
who has been mentioned since Keats, was Walter Savage Landor, 
much of whose composition was in prose, but who was so alike 
in prose and verse that the whole had better be noticed together 
here. Landor (who was of a family of some standing in Warwick- 
shire, and was heir to considerable property, much of which he 
wasted later by selling his inheritance and buying a large but 
unprofitable estate in Wales) was born at Ipsley Court, in 1775. 
He went to school at Rugby, and thence to Trinity College, 
Oxford, at both of which places he gained considerable scholar- 
ship but was frequently in trouble owing to the intractable and 
headstrong temper which distinguished him through life. He was 
indeed rusticated from his college, and subsequently, owing to his 
extravagant political views, was refused a commission in the War- 
wickshire Militia. He began to write early, but the poem of 
Gebir, which contains in germ or miniature nearly all his character- 
istics of style, passed almost unnoticed by the public, though it 
was appreciated by good wits like Southey and De Quincey. 
After various private adventures he came into his property and 
volunteered in the service of Spain, where he failed, as usual, from 
impracticableness. In 181 1, recklessly as always, he married 
a very young girl of whom he knew next to nothing, and the 
marriage proved anything but a happy one. The rest of his long 
life was divided into three residences : first with his family at 
Florence ; then, when he had quarrelled with his wife, at Bath ; and 
lastly (when he had been obliged to quit Bath and England 
owing to an outrageous lampoon on one lady, which he had 
written, as he conceived, in chivalrous defence of another) at 
Florence again. Here he died in September 1864, a ged very 
nearly ninety. 

Landor's poetical productions, which are numerous, are 



THE NEW POETRY 



spread over the greater part of his life ; his prose, by which he is 
chiefly known, dates in the main from the last forty years of it, the 
best being written between 1820 and 1840. The greater part of this 
prose takes the form of " Imaginary Conversations " — sometimes 
published under separate general headings, sometimes under the 
common title — between characters of all ages, from the classical 
times to Landor's. Their bulk is very great ; their perfection of 
style at the best extraordinary, and on the whole remarkably 
uniform ; their value, when considerations of matter are added to 
that of form, exceedingly unequal. For in them Landor not only 
allowed the fullest play to the ungovernable temper and the 
childish crotchets already mentioned, but availed himself of his 
opportunities (for, though he endeavoured to maintain a pretence 
of dramatic treatment, his work is nearly as personal as that of 
Byron) to deliver his sentiments on a vast number of subjects, 
sometimes without too much knowledge, and constantly with a 
plentiful lack of judgment. In politics, in satiric treatment, and 
especially in satiric treatment of politics, he is very nearly value- 
less. But his intense familiarity with and appreciation of clas- 
sical subjects gave to almost all his dealings with them a value 
which, for parallel reasons, is also possessed by those touching 
Italy. And throughout this enormous collection of work (which 
in the compactest edition fills five large octavo volumes in small 
print), whensoever the author forgets his crotchets and his rages, 
when he touches on the great and human things, his utterance 
reaches the very highest water-mark of English literature that is 
not absolutely the work of supreme genius. 

For supreme genius Landor had not. His brain was not 
a great brain, and he did not possess the exquisite alertness to his 
own weaknesses, or the stubborn knack of confinement to things 
suitable to him, which some natures much smaller than the great 
ones have enjoyed. But he had the faculty of elaborate style — 
of style elaborated by a careful education after the best models 
and vivified by a certain natural gift — as no one since the seven- 
teenth century had had it, and as no one except Mr. Ruskin and 



ii LANDOR 103 

the late Mr. Pater has had since. Also, he was as much wider 
in his range and more fertile in his production than Mr. Pater 
as he was more solidly grounded on the best models than Mr. 
Ruskin. Where Landor is quite unique is in the apparent 
indifference with which he was able to direct this gift of his into 
the channels of prose and poetry — a point on which he parts 
company from both the writers to whom he has been compared, 
and in which his only analogue, so far as I am able to judge, is 
Victor Hugo. The style of no Englishman is so alike in the two 
harmonies as is that of Landor. And it is perhaps not surprising 
that t this being the case, he shows at his best in prose when he 
tries long pieces, in verse when he tries short ones. Some of 
Landor's prose performances in Pericles and Aspasia, in the 
Pentameron (where Boccaccio and Petrarch are the chief inter- 
locutors), and in not a few of the separate conversations, are alto- 
gether unparalleled in any other language, and not easy to parallel 
in English. They are never entirely or perfectly natural ; there is 
always a slight " smell of the lamp," but of a lamp perfumed and 
undying. The charm is so powerful, the grace so stately, that it 
is impossible for any one to miss it who has the faculty of recognis- 
ing charm and grace at all. In particular, Landor is remarkable — 
and, excellent as are many of the prose writers whom we have 
had since, he is perhaps the most remarkable — for the weight, the 
beauty, and the absolute finish of his phrase. Sometimes these 
splendid phrases do not mean very much ; occasionally they mean 
nothing or nonsense. But their value as phrase survives, and the 
judge in such things is often inclined and entitled to say that 
there is none like them. 

This will prepare the reader who has some familiarity with 
literature for what is to be said about Landor's verse. It always 
has a certain quality of exquisiteness, but this quality is and could 
not but be unequally displayed in the short poems and the long. 
The latter can hardly attain, with entirely competent and im- 
partial judges, more than a success of esteem. Gebir is couched in 
a Miltonic form of verse (very slightly shot and varied by Romantic 



104 THE NEW POETRY 



admixture) which, as is natural to a young adventurer, caricatures 
the harder and more ossified style of the master. Sometimes it 
is great ; more usually it intends greatness. The " Dialogues in 
Verse" (very honestly named, for they are in fact rather dialogues 
in verse than poems), though executed by the hand of a master 
both of verse and dialogue, differ in form rather than in fact 
from the Conversations in prose. The Hellenics are mainly 
dialogues in verse with a Greek subject. All have a quality of 
nobility which may be sought in vain in almost any other poet ; 
but all have a certain stiffness and frigidity, some a certain empti- 
ness. They are never plaster, as some modern antiques have 
been ; but they never make the marble of which they are com- 
posed wholly flesh. Landor was but a half- Pygmalion. 

The vast collection of his miscellaneous poems contains many 
more fortunate attempts, some of which have, by common consent 
of the fittest, attained a repute which they are never likely to lose. 
"Rose Aylmer" and " Dirce," trifles in length as both of them 
are, are very jewels of poetic quality. And among the hundreds 
and almost thousands of pieces which Landor produced there 
are some which come not far short of these, and very many 
which attain a height magnificent as compared with the ordinary 
work of others. But the hackneyed comparison of amber does 
something gall this remarkable poet and writer. Everything, 
great and small, is enshrined in an imperishable coating of 
beautiful style ; but the small things are somewhat out of pro- 
portion to the great, and, what is more, the amber itself always 
has a certain air of being deliberately and elaborately produced — 
not of growing naturally. Landor — much more than Dryden, of 
whom he used the phrase, but in the same class as Dryden — is 
one of those who " wrestle with and conquer time." He has 
conquered, but it is rather as a giant of celestial nurture than as 
an unquestioned god. 

Even after enumerating these two sets of names — the first all of 
the greatest, and the greatest of the second, Landor, equalling the 
least of the first — we have not exhausted the poetical riches of 



a BOWLES 105 

this remarkable period. It is indeed almost dangerous to embark 
on the third class of poets ; yet its members here would in some 
cases have been highly respectable earlier, and even at this 
time deserve notice either' for influence, or for intensity of poetic 
vein, or sometimes for the mere fact of having been once famous 
and having secured a " place in the story." The story of litera- 
ture has no popular ingratitude ; and, except in the case of distinct 
impostors, it turns out with reluctance those who have once been 
admitted to it. Sometimes even impostors deserve a renewal 
of the brand, if not a freshening up of the honourable inscrip- 
tion. 

The first of this third class in date, and perhaps the first in 
influence, though far indeed from being the first in merit, was 
William Lisle Bowles, already once or twice referred to. He was 
born on 24th September 1762 ; so that, but for the character and 
influence of his verse, he belongs to the last chapter rather than 
to this. Educated at Winchester, and at Trinity College, Oxford, 
he took orders, and spent nearly the last half century of his very 
long life (he did not die till 1850) in Wiltshire, as Prebendary 
of Salisbury and Rector of Bremhill. It was in the year of the 
French Revolution that he published his Fourteen Sonnets [after- 
wards enlarged in number], written chiefly on Picturesque Spots 
during a Journey. These fell early into Coleridge's hands ; he 
copied and recopied them for his friends when he was a blue-coat 
boy, and in so far as poetical rivers have any single source, the 
first tricklings of the stream which welled into fulness with the 
Lyrical Ballads, and some few years later swept all before it, may 
be assigned to this very feeble fount. For in truth it is exceedingly 
feeble. In the fifth edition (1796), which lies before me ex- 
quisitely printed, with a pretty aquatint frontispiece by Aiken, and 
a dedication of the previous year to Dean Ogle of Winchester, the 
Sonnets have increased to twenty-seven, and are supplemented 
by fifteen " miscellaneous pieces." One of these latter is itself 
a sonnet "written at Southampton," and in all respects similar to 
the rest. The others — "On Leaving Winchester," "On the 



io6 THE NEW POETRY 



Death of Mr. Headley " the critic, a man of worth, 1 " To Mr. 
Burke on his Reflections," and so forth — are of little note. The 
same may be said of Bowies' later poetical productions, which 
were numerous ; but his edition of Pope, finished in 1807, brought 
about a hot controversy not yet forgotten (nor, to tell the truth, 
quite settled) on the question Whether Pope was a poet ? That 
Bowles can have had scant sympathy with Pope is evident from 
the very first glance at the famous sonnets themselves. Besides 
their form, which, as has been said, was of itself something of a 
reactionary challenge, they bear strong traces of Gray, and still 
stronger traces of the picturesque mania which was at the same 
time working so strongly in the books of Gilpin and others. But 
their real note is the note which, ringing in Coleridge's ear, echoed 
in all the poetry of the generation, the note of unison between the 
aspect of nature and the thought and emotion of man. In the 
sonnets " At Tynemouth," " At Bamborough Castle," and indeed 
in all, more or less, there is first the attempt to paint directly 
what the eye sees, not the generalised and academic view of the 
type-scene by a type-poet which had been the fashion for so long ; 
and secondly, the attempt to connect this vision with personal 
experience, passion, or meditation. Bowles does not do this 
very well, but he tries to do it ; and the others, seeing him try, 
went and did it. 

His extreme importance as an at least admitted " origin " has 

1 Henry Headley, who, like Bowles and Landor, was a member of Trinity 
College, Oxford, and who died young, after publishing a few original poems of 
no great value, deserves more credit for his Select Beauties of Ancient English 
Poetry, published in two volumes, with an exquisite title-page vignette, by Cadell 
in 1787, than has sometimes been allowed him by the not numerous critics who 
have noticed him recently, or by those who immediately followed him. His know- 
ledge was soon outgrown, and therefore looked down upon ; and his taste was a 
very little indiscriminate. But it was something to put before an age which was 
just awakening to the appetite for such things two volumes full of selections 
from the too little read poets of the seventeenth, with a few of the sixteenth 
century. Moreover, Headley's biographical information shows very praiseworthy 
industry, and his critical remarks a great deal of taste at once nice and fairly 
catholic. A man who in his day could, while selecting and putting forth 
Drayton and Carew, Daniel and King, speak enthusiastically of Dryden and 
even of Goldsmith, must have had the root of the matter in him as few critics 
have had. 



MINOR POETS 107 



procured him notice somewhat beyond his real deserts ; over others 
we must pass more rapidly. Robert Bloomfield, born in 1760, 
was one of those unfortunate "prodigy" poets whom mistaken 
kindness encourages. He was the son of a tailor, went early to 
agricultural labour, and then became a shoemaker. His Farmer's 
Boy, an estimable but much over-praised piece, was published in 
1S00, and he did other things later. He died mad, or nearly so, 
in 1823 — a melancholy history repeated pretty closely a generation 
later by John Clare. Clare, however, was a better poet than 
Bloomfield, and some of the "Poems written in an Asylum" 
have more than merely touching merit. James Montgomery, 1 
born at Irvine on 4th November 1771, was the son of a Moravian 
minister, and intended for his father's calling. He, however, 
preferred literature and journalism, establishing himself chiefly at 
Sheffield, where he died as late as 1854 (30th April). He had, as 
editor of the Sheffield Iris, some troubles with the law, and in 1S35 
was rewarded with a pension. Montgomery was a rather copious 
and fairly pleasing minor bard, no bad hand at hymns and short 
occasional pieces, and the author of longer things called The 
Wanderer of Switzerland, The West Indies, The World before the 
Flood, and The Pelican Island. Bernard Barton, an amiable 
Quaker poet, will probably always be remembered as the friend 
and correspondent of Charles Lamb ; perhaps also as the father- 
in-law of Edward FitzGerald. His verse commended itself both to 
Southey (who had a kindly but rather disastrous weakness for 
minor bards) and to Byron, but has little value. Barton died 
in 1849. 

The same pair of enemies joined in praising Henry Kirke 
White, who was born in 1785 and died when barely twenty-one. 
Here indeed Southey's unsurpassed biographical skill enforced the 
poetaster's merit in a charming Memoir, which assisted White's 

1 Not to be confounded with Robert, or " Satan " Montgomery, his junior by 
many years, and a much worse poet, the victim of Macaulay's famous classical ex- 
ample of what is called in English "slating," and in French ereintement. There is 
really nothing to be said about this person that Macaulay has not said ; though 
perhaps one or two of the things he has said are a little strained. 



io8 THE NEW POETRY 



rather pathetic story. He was the son of a butcher, a diligent 
but reluctant lawyer's clerk, an enthusiastic student, a creditable 
undergraduate at St. John's, Cambridge, and a victim of consump- 
tion. All this made his verse for a time popular. But he really 
deserved the name just affixed to him : he was a poetaster, and 
nothing more. The "genius" attributed to him in Byron's well- 
known and noble though rather rhetorical lines may be discovered 
on an average in about half a dozen poets during any two or three 
years of any tolerable poetic period. His best things are imitations 
of Cowper in his sacred mood, such as the familiar "Star of Beth- 
lehem," and even these are generally spoilt by some feebleness or 
false note. At his worst he is not far from Delia Crusca. 1 

In the same year with Kirke White was born a much better 
poet, and a much robuster person in all ways, mental and physical. 
Allan Cunningham was a Dumfriesshire man born in the lowest 
rank, and apprenticed to a stone-mason, whence in after years he 
rose to be Chantrey's foreman. Cunningham began — following 
a taste very rife at the time — with imitated, or to speak plainly, 
forged ballads ; but the merit of them deserved on true grounds 
the recognition it obtained on false, and he became a not incon- 
siderable man of letters of all work. His best known prose work 
is the " Lives of the Painters." In verse he is ranked, as a song 
writer in Scots, by some next to Burns, and by few lower than 
Hogg. Some of his pieces, such as " Fair shines the sun in France," 
have the real, the inexplicable, the irresistible song-gift. Cun- 
ningham, who was the friend of many good men and was liked 
by all of them, died on 29th October 1842. His elder by eleven 
years, Robert Tannahill, who was born in 1774 and died (prob- 
ably by suicide) in 18 10, deserves a few lines in this tale of Scots 
singers. Tannahill, like Cunningham in humble circumstances 
originally, never became more than a weaver. His verse has not 

1 Some fifteen years ago, in a little book on Dryden, I called Kirke White a 
" miserable poetaster," and was rebuked for it by those who perhaps knew Byron's 
lines and nothing more. Quite recently Mr. Gosse was rebuked more loudly for a 
less severe denunciation. I determined that I would read Kirke White again; 
and the above judgment is the mildest I can possibly pronounce after the reading. 
A good young man with a pathetic career ; but a poetaster merely. 



MINOR POETS 109 



the gusto of Allan or of Hogg, but is sweet and tender enough. 
William Motherwell too, as much younger than Allan as Tannahill 
was older (he was born in 1797 and died young in 1835), deserves 
mention, and may best receive it here. He was a Conservative 
journalist, an antiquary of some mark, and a useful editor of 
Minstrelsy. Of his original work, "Jeanie Morrison" is the best 
known ; and those who have read, especially if they have read it in 
youth, "The Sword Chant of Thorstein Raudi," will not dismiss 
it as Wardour Street; while he did some other delightful things. 
Earlier (18 12) the heroicomic Anster Fair of William Tennant 
( 1 784-1848) received very high and deserved no low praise; 
while William Thom, a weaver like Tannahill, who was a year 
younger than Motherwell and lived till 1848, wrote many simple 
ballads in the vernacular, of which the most touching are perhaps 
"The Song of the Forsaken" and "The Mitherless Bairn." 

To return to England, Bryan Waller Procter, who claimed 
kindred with the poet from whom he took his second name, was 
born in 1 790, went to Harrow, and, becoming a lawyer, was made 
a Commissioner of Lunacy. He did not die till 1874; and he, 
and still more his wife, were the last sources of direct informa- 
tion about the great race of the first third of the century. He 
was, under the pseudonym of " Barry Cornwall," a fluent verse 
writer of the so-called cockney school, and had not a little reputa- 
tion, especially for songs about the sea and things in general. They 
still, occasionally from critics who are not generally under the bond- 
age of traditional opinion, receive high praise, which the present 
writer is totally unable to echo. A loyal junior friend to Lamb, a 
wise and kindly senior to Beddoes, liked and respected by many 
or by all, Procter, as a man, must always deserve respect. If 

The sea, the sea, the open sea, 
The blue, the fresh, the ever free, 

and things like it are poetry, I admit myself, with a sad humility, 
to be wholly destitute of poetical appreciation. 

The Church of England contributed two admirable verse 



THE NEW POETRY 



writers of this period in Henry Cary and Reginald Heber. Cary, 
who was born in 1772 and was a Christ Church man, was long 
an assistant librarian in the British Museum. His famous trans- 
lation of the Divina Commedia, published in 18 14, is not only one 
of the best verse translations in English, but, after the lapse of 
eighty years, during which the study of Dante has been constantly 
increasing in England, in which poetic ideas have changed not 
a little, and in which numerous other translations have appeared, 
still attracts admiration from all competent scholars for its com- 
bination of fidelity and vigour. Heber, born in 1 783 and educated 
at Brasenose, gained the Newdigate with Palestine, a piece which 
ranks with Timbuctoo and a few others among unforgotten prize 
poems. He took orders, succeeding to the family living of Hodnet, 
and for some years bid fair to be one of the most shining lights of 
the English Church, combining admirable parochial work with 
good literature, and with much distinction as a preacher. Un- 
fortunately he thought it his duty to take the Bishopric of 
Calcutta when it was offered him; and, arriving there in 1824, 
worked incessantly for nearly two years and then died. His 
Journal in India is very pleasant reading, and some of his hymns 
rank with the best in English. 

Ebenezer Elliott, the " Corn-Law Rhymer," was born in York- 
shire on 7th March 1781. His father was a clerk in an iron- 
foundry. He himself was early sent to foundry work, and he 
afterwards became a master-founder at Sheffield. From different 
points of view it may be thought a palliation — and the reverse — 
of the extreme virulence with which Elliott took the side of work- 
men against landowners and men of property, that he attained to 
affluence himself as an employer, and was never in the least 
incommoded by the " condition-of-England " question. He early 
displayed a considerable affection for literature, and was one, and 
about the last, of the prodigies whom Southey, in his inexhaustible 
kindness for struggling men of letters, accepted. Many years 
later the Laureate wrote good-naturedly to Wynn : " I mean to 
read the Corn-Law Rhymer a lecture, not without some hope, 



II ELLIOTT m 

that as I taught him the art of poetry I may teach him something 
better." The "something better" was not in Elliott's way ; for he 
is a violent and crude thinker, with more smoke than fire in his 
violence, though not without generosity of feeling now and then, and 
with a keen admiration of the scenery — still beautiful in parts, and 
then exquisite — which surrounded the smoky Hades of Sheffield. 
He himself acknowledges the influence of Crabbe and disclaims 
that of Wordsworth, from which the cunning may anticipate the 
fact that he is deeply indebted to both. His earliest publication 
or at least composition, " The Vernal Walk," is said to date from 
the very year of the Lyrical Ballads, and of course owes no royalty 
to Wordsworth, but is in blank verse, a sort of compound of 
Thomson and Crabbe. " Love " (in Crabbian couplets slightly 
tinged with overlapping) and " The Village Patriarch" (still smack- 
ing of Crabbe in form, though irregularly arranged in rhymed deca- 
syllabics) are his chief other long poems. He tried dramas, but he 
is best known by his " Corn- Law Rhymes " and " Corn-Law Hymns," 
and deserves to be best known by a few lyrics of real beauty, and 
many descriptions. How a man who could write " The Wonders 
of the Lane " and " The Dying Boy to the Sloe Blossom " could 
stoop to malignant drivel about " palaced worms," " this syllabub- 
throated logician," and so forth, is strange enough to understand, 
especially as he had no excuse of personal suffering. Even in 
longer poems the mystery is renewed in " They Met Again " and 
"Withered Wild Flowers" compared with such things as "The 
Ranter," though the last exhibits the author at both his best and 
worst. However, Elliott is entitled to the charity he did not show ; 
and the author of such clumsy Billingsgate as " Arthur Bread-Tax 
Winner," " Faminton," and so forth, may be forgiven for the 
flashes of poetry which he exhibits. Even in his political poems 
they do not always desert him, and his somewhat famous Chartist 
(or ante-Chartist) "Battle-Song" is as right-noted as it is wrong- 
headed. 

Sir Aubrey de Vere (i 788-1846), a poet and the father of a 
poet still alive, was a friend and follower of Wordsworth, and the 



THE NEW POETRY 



author of sonnets good in the Wordsworthian kind. But he 
cannot be spared much room here ; nor can much even be given 
to the mild shade of a poetess far more famous in her day than 
he. "Time that breaks all things," according to the dictum of a 
great poet still living, does not happily break all in literature ; 
but it is to be feared that he has reduced to fragments the once 
not inconsiderable fame of Felicia Hemans. She was born (her 
maiden name was Felicia Dorothea Browne) at Liverpool on 
25th September 1794, and when she was only eighteen she 
married a Captain Hemans. It was not a fortunate union, and by 
far the greater part of Mrs. Hemans' married life was spent, owing 
to no known fault of hers, apart from her husband. She did not 
live to old age, dying on 26th April 1835. But she wrote a good 
deal of verse meanwhile — plays, poems, " songs of the affections," 
and what not. Her blameless character (she wrote chiefly to 
support her children) and a certain ingenuous tenderness in her 
verse, saved its extreme feebleness from severe condemnation in 
an age which was still avid of verse rather than discriminating in 
it ; and children still learn "The boy stood on the burning deck," 
and other things. It is impossible, on any really critical scheme, 
to allow her genius ; but she need not be spoken of with any 
elaborate disrespect, while it must be admitted that her latest 
work is her best — always a notable sign. " Despondency and 
Aspiration," dating from her death-year, soars close to real 
sublimity ; and of her smaller pieces " England's Dead " is no 
vulgar thing. 

Between the death of Byron and the distinct appearance of 
Tennyson and the Brownings there was a kind of interregnum or 
twilight of poetry, of which one of its strangest if not least illumi- 
native stars or meteors, Beddoes, has given a graphic but uncom- 
plimentary picture in a letter: "owls' light" he calls it, with 
adjuncts. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey ; Scott, Campbell, 
and Moore, were all living, but the poetic production of all had 
on the whole ceased. Shelley and Keats would have been in 
time the natural, and in genius the more than sufficient sun and 



MINOR POETS 



"3 



moon of the time ; but they had died before Byron. So the 
firmament was occupied by rather wandering stars : some of them 
elders already noticed, others born in the ten or twelve years 
between Keats (1795) and the eldest of the Tennysons (1807). 
The chief of these were the pair of half-serious, half-humorous 
singers, Hood and Praed. Next in public estimation come 
Talfourd, Hartley Coleridge, Macaulay, Sir Henry Taylor, the 
Irish poet Mangan, R. H. Home, and the first Lord Lytton ; 
while a third class — of critics' rather than readers' favourites — 
varying in merit, but, at the best of the best of them, ranking 
higher than any of the above, may be made up of George 
Darley, C. J. Wells, the Dorsetshire poet Barnes, Beddoes, 
Charles Whitehead, R. S. . Hawker, and Thomas Wade. To the 
second class must be added " L. E. L.," the poetess who filled 
the interval between Mrs. Hemans and Mrs. Browning. 

Wells, Whitehead, and Wade may be dismissed without dis- 
respect as, if not critical mares'-nests, at any rate critical hobbies. 
Persons of more or less distinction (and of less or more crotchet) 
have at different times paid very high compliments to the Joseph 
and his Brethren (1823, revised later) of Charles Jeremiah Wells 
(1S00-1879), a friend of Keats, and a person who seems to have 
lived much as he pleased ; to the Solitary of Charles Whitehead 
(1804-1862), a Bohemian ne'er-do-weel, who also showed talent 
as a novelist and miscellanist ; and to the Mundi ct Cordis 
Carmina (1835) °f Thomas Wade (1805-1875), a playwright and 
journalist. Of the three, Wade appears to me to have had the 
greatest poetical talent. But I do not think that any one who on 
the one hand uses epithets in poetical criticism with caution, and 
on the other has read a great deal of minor poetry as it appears, 
could put any one of them very high. All were born late 
enough to breathe the atmosphere of the new poetry young ; all 
had poetical velleities, and a certain amount, if not of originality, 
of capacity to write poetry. But they were not poets ; they were 
only poetical curiosities. 

Darley, Beddoes, and Home belong in the main to the same 
1 



1 1 4 THE NEW POETRY 



class, but rise high, in one case immeasurably, above them. 
George Darley (i 795-1846) is perhaps our chief English example 
of " the poet who dies in youth while the man survives," and who 
becomes a critic. In him, however, the generation of the critic 
did not wait for the corruption of the poet. An Irishman, and 
of Trinity College, Dublin, he was one of the staff of the London 
Magazine, and wrote much verse bad and good, including the 
once famous " I've been Roaming," of which it is safe to say that 
not one in ten of those who have sung it could tell the author. 
His best work is contained in the charming pastoral drama of 
Sylvia (1827) and the poem entitled Nepenthe (1839). He was 
a good but rather a savage critic, and edited Beaumont and 
Fletcher. His work has never been collected, nor, it is believed, 
ever fully published ; and it has the marks of a talent that never 
did what was in it to do, and came at an unfortunate time. Some 
not bad judges in the forties ranked Darley with Tennyson in 
poetic possibilities, and thought the former the more promising of 
the two. 

Except Donne, there is perhaps no English poet more difficult 
to write about, so as to preserve the due pitch of enthusiasm on 
the one hand and criticism on the other, than Thomas Lovell 
Beddoes, bore at Clifton on 20th July 1803. He was the son of 
a very famous physician, and of Anna Edgeworth, the youngest 
sister of the whole blood to the novelist. Beddoes, left fatherless 
at six years old, was educated at the Charterhouse and at 
Pembroke College, Oxford, and when he was barely of age went 
to Germany to study medicine, living thenceforth almost entirely 
on the Continent. Before this he had published two volumes, 
The Improvisato?-e and The Bride's Tragedy ; but his principal 
work is a wild Elizabethan play called Death's Jest-Book or The 
Fool's Tragedy, which he never absolutely finished. He died in 
1848 at Basle by a complicated and ghastly kind of suicide. 
Three years later his Poems appeared, and they have been recently 
republished, with additions and a curious collection of letters. 

Beddoes has sometimes been treated as a mainly bookish 



n BEDDOES 115 

poet deriving from the Elizabethans and Shelley. I cannot agree 
with this. His very earliest work, written when he could not 
know much either of Shelley or Keats, shows as they do 
technique perhaps caught from Leigh Hunt. But this is quite 
dropped later ; and his Elizabethanism is not imitation but in- 
spiration. In this inspiration he does not follow, but shares with, 
his greater contemporaries. He is a younger and tragic counter- 
part to Charles Lamb in the intensity with which he has imbibed 
the Elizabethan spirit, rather from the nightshade of Webster and 
Tourneur than from the vine of Shakespeare. As wholes, his 
works are naught, or naught but nightmares ; though Death's 
Jest-Book, despite its infinite disadvantages from constant rewrit- 
ing and uncertainty of final form, has a strong grasp. But they 
contain passages, especially lyrics, of the most exquisite fancy and 
music, such as since the seventeenth century none but Blake and 
Coleridge had given. Beddoes does not seem to have been at 
all a pleasant person, and in his later days at any rate he would 
appear to have been a good deal less than sane. But the author 
of such things as the " Dirge for Wolfram " ("If thou wilt ease 
thine heart ") in Death's Jest-Booh, and the stanza beginning 
" Dream-Pedlary," " If there were dreams to sell," with not a few 
others of the same kind, attains to that small and disputed — but 
not to those who have thought out the nature of poetry disputable 
— class of poets who, including Sappho, Catullus, some mediaeval 
hymn-writers, and a few moderns, especially Coleridge, have, by 
virtue of fragments only, attained a higher position than many 
authors of large, substantive, and important poems. They 
may be shockingly lacking in bulk, in organisation, in proper 
choice of subject, in intelligent criticism of life ; but they are 
like the summer lightning or the northern aurora, which, though 
they shine only now and then, and only it may be for a few 
moments, shine, when they do shine, with a beauty unapproach- 
able by gas or candle, hardly approached by sun or moon, and 
illuminate the whole of their world. 

Although quotation is in the main impossible in this book, 



n6 THE NEW POETRY 



Beddoes, despite the efforts of his friend Kelsall, of Mr. Swin- 
burne, of Mr. Gosse (thanks to whom a quasi-complete edition 
has at last appeared), and others, is still so little known, that a 
short one may be allowed in his case. I have known a critic 
who said deliberately of the above-mentioned stanza in " Dream- 
Pedlary " — 

If there were dreams to sell, 

What would you buy? 
Some cost a passing bell, 

Some a light sigh 
That shakes from Life's fresh crown 
Only a roseleaf down. 
If there were dreams to sell — 
Merry and sad to tell — 
And the crier rung the bell, 

What would you buy? 

that these ten lines contain more pure poetry than the entire 
works of Byron. And the same touch will be found not merely 
in the " Wolfram Dirge " mentioned — 

If thou wilt ease thine heart 
Of Love and all its smart, 
Then sleep, dear, sleep. 

But wilt thou awe thine heart 
Of Love and all its smart, 
Then die, dear, die — 

but in several other dirges (for the dirge is the form natural to 
Beddoes), in the "Song from Torrismond," in " Love in Idleness," 
in the " Song on the Water " (which is pure early Tennyson), in the 
exquisite " Threnody," and in many other things. They have been 
called artificial : the epithet can be allowed in no other sense 
than in that in which it applies to all the best poetry. And they 
have the note, which only a few true but imperfect poets have, of 
anticipation. Shadows before, both of Tennyson and Brown- 
ing, especially of the latter, appear in Beddoes. But after all 
his main note is his own : not theirs, not the Elizabethan, not 
Shelley's, not another's. And this is what makes a poet. 

As Beddoes' forte lay in short and rather uncanny snatches, 



ii HORNE 1 1 7 

so that of Richard Hengist Home lay in sustained and dignified 
composition. He was not christened Hengist at all, but Henry. 
He had a curious life. In youth he knew Keats and Wells, having 
been, like them, at the private school of Mr. Clarke at Edmonton. 
He went to Sandhurst and was expelled for insubordination ; 
joined the Mexican navy in the war of liberation ; travelled widely ; 
but seemed at about five and twenty to be settling down to 
literature and journalism in England. After writing various 
things, he produced in 1837 the fine but not quite "live" plays 
of Cosmo de Medici and The Death of Marlowe, and in 1843 
the famous farthing epic, Orion, which was literally published 
at a farthing. This was the smallest part of a great literary 
baggage of very unequal value. In 1852 Home, resuming the 
life of adventure, went to Australia, served in the gold police, and 
stayed at the Antipodes till 1869. Then he came home again 
and lived for fifteen years longer, still writing almost to his very 
death on 13th March 1884. 

It is not true that Orion is Home's only work of value ; but it 
is so much better than anything else of his, and so characteristic 
of him, that by all but students the rest may be neglected. And 
it is an example of the melancholy but frequently exemplified 
truth, that few things are so dangerous, nay, so fatal to enduring 
literary fame, as the production of some very good work among a 
mass of, if not exactly rubbish, yet inferior stuff. I do not think 
it extravagant to say that if Home had written nothing but Orion 
and had died comparatively young after writing it, he would have 
enjoyed very high rank among English poets. For, though 
doubtless a little weighted with "purpose," it is a very fine 
poem indeed, couched in a strain of stately and not second-hand 
blank verse, abounding in finished and effective passages, by no 
means destitute of force and meaning as a whole, and mixing 
some passion with more than some real satire. But the rather 
childish freak of its first publication probably did it no good, and 
it is quite certain that the author's long life and unflagging pro- 
duction did it much harm. 



u8 THE NEW POETRY 



Of the other persons in the list above, Macaulay, Hartley 
Coleridge, and Lord Lytton are mainly something else than poets, 
and Talfourd, as a dramatist, will also be noticed elsewhere. Barnes 
and Hawker were both clergymen of the West of England : the 
former very highly ranked by some for his studies in Dorset 
dialect; the latter the author of the famous "Song of the 
Western Men" (long thought a genuine antique), of the ex- 
quisite "Queen Gwennyvar's Round," of the fine "Silent Tower 
of Bottreaux," of some beautiful sonnets, and of the stately 
"Quest of the Sangreal." Whether James Clarence Mangan, 
whose most famous poem is "Dark Rosaleen," a musical and 
mystic celebration of the charms and wrongs of Erin, is a great 
poet to whom Saxon jealousy has refused greatness for political 
reasons, or a not ungifted but not consummately distinguished 
singer who added some study to the common Irish gift of 
fluent, melodious verse-making, is a question best solved by read- 
ing his work and judging for the reader's self. It is not by any 
sane account so important that to dismiss it thus is a serious 
rifiuio, and it is probably impossible for Irish enthusiasm and 
English judgment ever to agree on the subject. Of "L. E. L." Sir 
Henry Taylor, Hood, and Praed, some more substantive account 
must be given. 

Although it is not easy, after two generations, to decide such a 
point accurately, it is probable that "L. E. L." was the most 
popular of all the writers of verse who made any mark between 
the death of Byron in 1824 and the time when Tennyson defi- 
nitely asserted himself in 1842. She paid for this popularity 
(which was earned not merely by her verse, but by a pretty face, 
an odd social position, and a sad and apparently, though it seems 
not really, mysterious end) by a good deal of slightly unchivalrous 
satire at the time and a rather swift and complete oblivion after- 
wards. She was born (her full name being Letitia Elizabeth 
Landon) in London on 14th August 1802, and was fairly well 
connected and educated. William Jerdan, the editor of the 
Literary Gazette (a man whose name constantly occurs in the 



\.. 



L. E. L. — SIR H. TAYLOR 



119 



literary history of this time, though he has left no special work 
except an Autobiography), was a friend of her family, and she 
began to write very early, producing novels and criticisms as well 
as verse in newspapers, in the albums and Souvenirs which were 
such a feature of the twenties and thirties, and in independent 
volumes. She was particularly active as a poet about 1824-35, 
when appeared the works whose titles — The Improvisatore, The 
Troubadour, The Golden Violet — suggested parodies to Thackeray. 
Her best novel is held to be Ethel Churchill, published in 1837. 
Next year she married Mr. Maclean, the Governor of Cape Coast 
Castle ; and, going out with him to that not very salubrious clime, 
died suddenly in about two months. All sorts of ill-natured 
suggestions were of course made ; but the late Colonel Ellis, the 
historian of the colony, seems to have established beyond the 
possibility of doubt that she accidentally poisoned herself with 
prussic acid, which she used to take for spasms of the heart. 

It is tolerably exact, and it is not harsh, to say that " L. E. L." 
is a Mrs. Hemans with the influence of Byron added, not to the 
extent of any "impropriety," but to the heightening of the 
Romantic tone and of a native sentimentality. Her verse is 
generally musical and sweet : it is only sometimes silly. But it 
is too often characterised by what can but be called the " gush " 
which seems to have affected all the poetesses of this period 
except Sara Coleridge (1802-50) (who has some verses worthy 
of even her name in Phantasmion, her only independent book) , 
and which appears in very large measure in the work of Mrs. 
Browning. 

Sir Henry Taylor's poetical repute illustrates the converse of 
the proposition which is illustrated by that of Home. It is 
probable that, if each is measured by his best things, Orion and 
Philip Van Arteveldc, Home must be allowed to be a good deal 
the better poet. But a placid official life enabled Taylor both to 
gain powerful friends and to devote himself to literature merely 
when and how he pleased. And so he has burdened his baggage 
with no mere hack-work. He was indeed a singularly lucky 



THE NEW POETRY 



person. The son of a man of fair family but reduced fortune 
who had taken to farming, Henry Taylor began in the navy. 
But he disliked the service very much, and either obtained or 
received his discharge after only nine months' sea life as a mid- 
shipman during the year 1814. Then he entered the public 
store-keeper's department, but was ousted by rearrangements after 
four years' service. These beginnings were not very promising ; 
but his father allowed him to stay quietly at home till by pure 
luck he obtained a third post under Government in the Colonial 
Office. This he held for nearly fifty years, during which it gave 
him affluence and by degrees a very high position, and left him 
abundance of time for society and letters. He resigned it in 
1872, and died on 27th March 1886. He wrote some prose of 
various kinds, and just before his death published a pleasant 
autobiography. But his literary fame rests on a handful of plays 
and poems, all of them, except St. Clement's Eve, which did not 
appear till 1862, produced at leisurely intervals between 1827 
(Isaac Comnenus) and 1847 {.The Eve of the Conquest and other 
poems) . The intervening works were Philip Van Artevelde (his 
masterpiece, 1834), Edwin the Fair (1842), some minor poems, 
and the romantic comedy of A Sicilian Summer (first called The 
Virgin Widow) , which was published with St. Clement's Eve. He 
had (as, it may be noted curiously, had so many of the men of 
the transition decade in which he was born) a singular though 
scanty vein of original lyric snatch, the best example of which is 
perhaps the song " Quoth tongue of neither maid nor wife " in 
Van Artevelde ; but his chief appeal lay in a very careful study 
of character and the presentation of it in verse less icy than 
Talfourd's and less rhetorical than Milman's. Yet he had, unlike 
either of these, very little direct eye to the stage, and therefore is 
classed here as a poet rather than as a dramatist. There is always 
a public for what is called " thoughtful " poetry, and Taylor's is 
more than merely thoughtful. But it may be suspected by 
observers that when Robert Browning came into fashion Henry 
Taylor went out. Citations of Van Artevelde, if not of the other 



ii HOOD 121 

pieces (none of which are contemptible, while the two last, 
inferior in weight to their predecessors, show advance in ease and 
grace), are very frequent between 1835 and 1865 : rare I think 
between 1865 and 1895. 

And so we come at last to the twin poets, in the proper sense 
humorous, — that is to say, jesting with serious thoughts behind, — 
of the first division of this class. They were very close in many 
ways — indeed it is yet a moot point which of the two borrowed 
certain rhythms and turns of word and verse from the other, or 
whether both hit upon these independently. But their careers 
were curiously different ; and, except in comparative length of life 
(if that be an advantage), Praed was luckier than his comrade. 
Thomas Hood, who was slightly the elder, was born in 1798 or 
1799 (for both dates are given) in the Poultry; his father being a 
bookseller and publisher. This father died, not in good circum- 
stances, when the son was a boy, and Thomas, after receiving some 
though not much education, became first a merchant's clerk and 
then an engraver, but was lucky enough to enjoy between these 
uncongenial pursuits a long holiday, owing to ill-health, of some 
three years in Scotland. It was in 1820 or thereabouts that he 
fell into his proper vocation, and, as sub- editor of the London 
Magazine, found vent for his own talents and made acquaintance 
with most of its famous staff. He married, wrote some of his 
best serious poems and some good comic work, and found that 
while the former were neglected the latter was eagerly welcomed. 
It was settled that, in his own pathetic pun, he was to be " a lively 
Hood for a livelihood " thenceforward. It is difficult to say whether 
English literature lost or gained, except from one very practical 
point of view ; for Hood did manage to live after a fashion by 
his fun as he certainly could not have lived by his poetry. He 
had, however, a bare pittance, much bad health, and some ex- 
tremely bad luck, which for a time made him, through no fault 
of his own, an exile. His last five years were again spent in 
England, and in comparative, though very comparative, prosperity; 
for he was editor first of the New Monthly Magazine, then of a 



THE NEW POETRY 



magazine of his own, Hood's Monthly, and not long before his 
death he received from Sir Robert Peel a civil list pension of 
/^ioo a year. The death was due to consumption, inherited and 
long valiantly struggled with. 

The still shorter life of Winthrop Mackworth Praed, on the 
other hand, was passed under sufficiently favourable stars. He 
was born in 1802, and his father, Serjeant Praed, possessed 
property, practice at the bar, and official position. Praed was 
sent to Eton, where he became a pillar of the famous school 
magazine The Etonian, and thence to Trinity College, Cambridge, 
where he did extremely well, made the acquaintance of Macaulay, 
and wrote in Knighfs Quarterly. After a short interval of tutor- 
ing and reading for the bar he entered Parliament in 1830, and 
remained in it for the rest of his life, which closed on 15th July 
1839. He had latterly been secretary to the Board of Control, 
and it was thought that, had he lived, he might have made a con- 
siderable political reputation both as speaker and administrator. 

The almost unchequered sunshine of one of these careers and 
the little sun and much shadow of the other have left traces — 
natural though less than might be supposed — of difference between 
the produce of the two men ; but perhaps the difference is less 
striking than the resemblance. That Hood — obliged to write for 
bread, and outliving Praed by something like a decade at the two 
ends — wrote a great deal more than Praed did is of little con- 
sequence, for the more leisurely writer is as unequal as the duty 
labourer. Hood had the deeper and stronger genius : of this 
there is no doubt, and the advantage more than made up for 
Praed's advantages in scholarship and in social standing and 
accomplishment. In this serious work of Hood's — Lycus the 
Centaur, The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, The Elm Tree, The 
Haunted House — there is observable — to a degree never surpassed 
by any of the poets of this group except Beddoes, and more sustained 
and human, though less weird and sweet, than his — a strain of the 
true, the real, the ineffable tone of poetry proper. At this Praed 
never arrives : there are at most in him touches which may seem 



PRAED 



123 



to a very charitable judgment to show that in other circumstances 
sorrow, passion, or the like might have roused him to display the 
hidden fire. On the other hand, neither Hood's breeding, nor, I 
think, his nature, allowed him to display the exquisite airiness, the 
delicate artificial bloom and perfection, of Praed's best vers de 
societe — the Season, the Letter of Advice, and the rest. This last 
bloom has never been quite equalled — even Prior's touch is coarse 
to it, even that of the late Mr. Locker is laboured and deliberate. 
So too as there is nothing in Praed of the popular indignation — 
generous and fine but a little theatrical — which endears Hood to 
the general in The Bridge of Sighs and The Song of the Shirt, so 
there is nothing in Hood of the sound political sense, underlying 
apparent banter, of Praed's Speaker Asleep and other things. 

But where the two poets come together, on a ground which 
they have almost to themselves, is in a certain kind of humorous 
poetry ranging from the terrific-grotesque, as in Hood's Miss 
Kilmansegg and Praed's Red Fisher/nan, to the simple, humor- 
ously tender study of characters, as in a hundred things of Hood's 
and in not a few of Praed's with The Vicar at their head. The 
resemblance here is less in special points than in a certain general 
view of life, conditioned in each case by the poet's breeding, 
temperament, and circumstance, but alike in essence and quality : 
in a certain variety of the essentially English fashion of taking 
life with a mixture of jest and earnest, of humour and sentiment. 
Hood, partly influenced by the need of caring for the public, 
partly by his pupilship to Lamb, perhaps went to further extremes 
both in mere fun and in mere sentiment than Praed did, but the 
central substance is the same in both. 

Yet one gift which Hood has and Praed has not remains to be 
noticed — the gift of exquisite song writing. Compared with the 
admired inanities of Barry Cornwall, his praised contemporary, 
Hood's " Fair Ines," his " Time of Roses," his exquisite " Last 
Stanzas," and not a few other things, are as gold to gilt copper. 
Praed has nothing to show against these ; bat he, like Hood, was 
no inconsiderable prose writer, while the latter, thanks to his 






124 THE NEW POETRY 



apprenticeship to the burin, had an extraordinary faculty of illus- 
trating his own work with cuts, contrary to all the canons, but 
inimitably grotesque. 

It is probable that even in this long survey of the great 
poetical production of the first third of this century some gaps 
may be detected by specialists. But it seemed to me impossible 
to give more than the barest mention here to the " single speech " 
accident of Charles Wolfe, the author of the " Burial of Sir John 
Moore," which everybody knows, and of absolutely nothing else 
that is worth a single person's knowing ; to the gigantic and 
impossible labours of Edwin Atherstone ; to the industrious 
translation of Rose and Sotheby ; to the decent worth of Caroline 
Bowles, and the Hood-and- water of Laman Blanchard. And there 
are others perhaps who cannot be even mentioned ; for there must 
be an end. 



CHAPTER III 



THE NEW FICTION 



Although, as was shown in the first chapter, the amount of novel 
writing in the last decades of the eighteenth century was very 
considerable, and the talent displayed by at least some of the 
practitioners of the form distinctly great, it can hardly have been 
possible for any careful observer of it, either during the last ten 
years of the old age or the first fifteen of the new, to be satisfied 
with it on the whole, or to think that it had reached a settled or 
even a promising condition. Miss Burney (now Madame d'Arblay) , 
whose brilliant d£but with Evelina was made just before the date 
at which this book begins, had just after that date produced 
Cecilia, in which partial and contemporary judges professed to 
see no falling off. But though she was still living and writing, 
— though she lived and wrote till the present century was nearly 
half over, — Camilla (1796) was acknowledged as a doubtful suc- 
cess, and The Wanderer (1814) as a disastrous failure; nor after 
this did she attempt the style again. 

The unpopularity of Jacobinism and the growing distaste for 
the philosophy of the eighteenth century prevented much attempt 
being made to follow up the half political, half philosophical novel 
of Godwin, Holcroft, and Bage. No such causes, however, were in 
operation as concerning the "Tale of Terror," the second founder 
of which, Monk Lewis, was indeed no inconsiderable figure during 
the earlier part of the great age of 1810-30, while Charles Robert 
Maturin improved considerably upon Lewis himself. Maturin 

125 



126 THE NEW FICTION 



was born in Ireland (where he principally lived) in 1782, and died 
there in 1 S24. He took orders, but was too eccentric for success 
in his profession, and his whole heart was set on literature and 
the drama. Befriended by Scott and Byron, though very severely 
criticised by Coleridge, he succeeded in getting his tragedy of 
Bertram acted at Drury Lane with success ; but his later 
theatrical ventures {Manuel, Fredolpho) were less fortunate. He 
also published sermons ; but he lives in literature only by his 
novels, and not very securely by these. He produced three of 
them — The Fatal Vengeance : or, The Family of Montorio, The 
Wild Irish Boy, and the Milesian Chief — under a pseudonym 
before he was thirty ; while after the success of Bertram he 
avowed Women (1818), Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), and The 
Albigenses (1824), the last in a sort of cross style between his earlier 
patterns and Scott. But his fame had best be allowed to rest 
wholly on Melmoth, a remarkable book dealing with the supposed 
selling of a soul to the devil in return for prolonged life ; the 
bargain, however, being terminable if the seller can induce some 
one else to take it off his hands. Although far too long, 
marvellously involved with tales within tales, and disfigured in 
parts by the rant and the gush of its class, Melmoth is really 
a powerful book, which gave something more than a passing 
shudder to its own generation (it specially influenced Balzac), 
and which has not lost its force even now. But the usual novel 
of this kind, which was written in vast numbers, was simply 
beneath contempt. 

The exquisite artist who, as mentioned formerly, had taken 
these tales of terror as part subject of her youthful satire, had 
begun to write some years before the close of the eighteenth 
century. But Miss Austen's books were long withheld from the 
press, and she was considerably preceded in publication by 
Maria Edgeworth. These last are the only novels of the first 
decade of the nineteenth century which have held any ground, 
though they were but few among the crowds not merely of tales 
of terror but of fashionable novels, " Minerva Press " inanities, 



MISS EDGE WORTH 127 



attempts in the bastard and unsuccessful kind of historical romance 
which preceded Scott's, and others. Miss Edgeworth, who was 
born in 1767, the daughter of an eccentric busybody of good 
family and property in Ireland, and who lived till 1848, had a 
great fame in her own day, deserved it, never entirely lost it, 
and has lately had it revived ; while Scott declared (but in such 
matters Scott was a little apt to let his good-nature and his free- 
dom from personal vanity get the better of strict critical truth) 
that her Irish novels had supplied the suggestion of his Scotch 
ones. Her chief works in this kind were Castle RacJwent (tSoi), 
a book with little interest of the strictly "novel" kind, but 
a wonderful picture of the varieties of recklessness and miscon- 
duct which in the course of a generation or two ruined or crippled 
most of the landlords of Ireland; Belinda (1803), her most 
ambitious and elaborate if not her most successful effort, which 
includes a very vivid and pregnant sketch of the feminine dissipa- 
tion of the end of the last century ; Tales of Fashionable Life, 
including the admirable Absentee ; and Ormond, the most vivid of 
her Irish stories next to Castle Rackrent. She continued to write 
novels as late as 1834 {Helen), while some very charming letters 
of hers, though privately printed a good many years ago, were 
not published till 1894. Miss Edgeworth's father, Richard, was 
himself something of a man of letters, and belonged to the class 
of Englishmen who, without imbibing French freethinking, had 
eagerly embraced the " utility " doctrines, the political economy, 
and some of the educational and social crazes of the French 
philosophes ; and he did his daughter no good by thrusting into 
her earlier work a strain of his own crotchet and purpose. In- 
directly, however, this brought about in The Parent's Assistant, in 
other books for children, and in the Moral Tales, some of her most 
delightful work. In the novels (which besides these mentioned 
include Leonora, Harrington, Ennui, and Patronage, the longest of 
all) Miss Edgeworth occupies a kind of middle position between 
the eighteenth century novelists, of whom Miss Burney is the last, 
and those of the nineteenth, of whom Miss Austen is the first. 



128 THE NEW FICTION 



This is not merely, though no doubt it is partly, due to the fact 
that the society which she saw (and she mixed in a great deal, from 
the highest downwards) was itself in a kind of transition state : it 
was at least as much owing to a certain want of distinct modern- 
ness and distinct universality in her own character, thought, and 
style. Miss Edgeworth, though possessed of delightful talents 
falling little short of genius, and of much humour (which last is 
shown in the charming Essay on Irish Bulls, as well as in her 
novels and her letters), missed, as a rule, the last and greatest 
touches ; and, except some of her Irish characters, who are rather 
types than individuals, she has not created many live persons, 
while sometimes she wanders very far from life. Her touch, in 
short, though extremely pleasant, was rather uncertain. She can 
tell a story to perfection, but does not often invent it perfectly ; 
and by herself she can hardly be said to have originated anything, 
though of course, if we could accept the above quoted statement 
of Scott's, she indirectly originated a very great deal. 

Very different is the position occupied by Jane Austen, who 
was born at Steventon in Hampshire on 16th December 1775, 
being the daughter of the rector of that place, lived a quiet life 
chiefly at various places in her native county, frequented good 
society in the rank of not the richest country squires, to which 
her own family belonged, and died at Winchester unmarried on 
24th July 181 7. Of her six completed novels, Sense and 
Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, and Emma were 
published during the last seven years of her life, while Northanger 
Abbey and Persuasion appeared, for the first time with an author's 
name, the year after her death. They had no enormous or 
sudden popularity, but the best judges, from Scott downwards, 
at once recognised their extraordinary merit ; and it is not too 
much to say that by the best judges, with rare exceptions, that 
merit has been acknowledged with ever increasing fulness at 
once of enthusiasm and discrimination to the present day. With 
Scott, Miss Austen is the parent of nineteenth century fiction ; 
or, to speak with greater exactness, she is the mother of the 



MISS AUSTEN 129 



nineteenth century novel, just as he is the father of the nineteenth 
century romance. 

One indeed of the most wonderful things about her is her 
earliness. Even the dates of publication of her first books 
precede those of any novelist of the same rank and the same 
modernity ; but these dates are misleading. Northanger Abbey 
was written more than twenty years before it appeared, and the 
bulk of Pride and Prejudice (which some hold to be the best 
and most characteristic of all) is known to have been as old at 
least as Northanger Abbey. That is to say, almost at the very 
time of the appearance of Camilla (to which, by the way, Miss 
Austen was an original subscriber), a book not strikingly more 
nineteenth century in tone than the novels of Richardson, though 
a little more so in manners, a girl even younger than Miss 
Burney herself had been when she wrote Evelina was drawing 
other girls, who, putting aside the most trivial details of dress, 
speech, and so forth, might be living girls to-day. 

The charm and the genius of Miss Austen are not universally 
admitted ; the touch of old fashion in external detail apparently 
discontenting some readers, the delicate and ever-present irony 
either escaping or being distasteful to others, while the extreme 
quietness of the action and the entire absence of excitement 
probably revolt a third class. But the decriers do not usually 
attempt formal criticism. However, they sometimes do, and 
such an attempt once came under the notice of the present 
historian. It was urged that to extol Miss Austen's method is 
a masculine delusion, that method being nothing but the 
throwing into literature of the habit of minute and semi-satiric 
observation natural to womankind. It did not apparently occur 
to this critic that he (or she) was in the first place paying Miss 
Austen an extraordinarily high compliment — a compliment almost 
greater than the most enthusiastic " Janites " have ventured — 
inasmuch as no higher literary triumph can be even conceived 
than thus to focus, formulate, and crystallise the special talent 
and gift of an entire sex into a literary method. Nor did it 



130 THE NEW FICTION 



probably occur to him that he was laying himself open to the 
damaging, or rather ruinous retort, "Then how is it that, of 
all the women who have preceded and followed Miss Austen 
as novelists, no other has displayed this specially and universally 
feminine gift? " 

It is no doubt true that there is something feminine about 
the method, which, with the addition of a certain ncscio quid, 
giving it its modern difference, may be said to combine the 
peculiarities of Fielding and of Richardson, though it works on 
a much smaller scale than either. It has the intense and per- 
vading, though not the exuberant and full-blooded, livingness of 
Fielding, and it also has something not unlike a feminine 
counterpart and complement of his pervading irony; while it 
is not unlike Richardson in building up the characters and the 
stories partly by an infinity of tiny strokes of detail, often 
communicated in conversation, partly by the use of an exceedingly 
nice and delicate analysis of motive and temperament. It is 
in the former respect that Miss Austen stands apart from most, 
if not from all, women who have written novels. Irony is by no 
means a frequent feminine gift ; and as women do not often 
possess it in any great degree, so they do not as a rule enjoy it. 
Miss Austen is only inferior among English writers to Swift, to 
Fielding, and to Thackeray — even if it be not improper to use 
the term inferiority at all for what is after all not much more 
than difference — in the use of this potent but most double- 
edged weapon. Her irony indeed is so subtle that it requires 
a certain dose of subtlety to appreciate it, and it is not uncommon 
to find those who consider such personages as Mr. Collins in 
Pride and Prejudice to be merely farcical, instead of, as they 
are in fact, preachers of the highest and most Shakespearian 
comedy. But there would be no room here to examine Miss 
Austen's perfections in detail ; the important thing for the pur- 
poses of this history is to observe again that she " set the clock," 
so to speak, of pure novel writing to the time which was to be 
nineteenth century time to this present hour. She discarded 



SCOTT'S NOVELS 



131 



violent and romantic adventure. She did not rely in the very 
least degree on describing popular or passing fashions, amuse- 
ments, politics ; but confined herself to the most strictly ordinary 
life. Yet she managed in some fashion so to extract the 
characteristics of that life which are perennial and human, that 
there never can be any doubt to fit readers in any age finding 
themselves at home with her, just as they find themselves at 
home with all the greatest writers of bygone ages. And lastly, 
by some analogous process she hit upon a style which, though 
again true to the ordinary speech of her own day, and therefore 
now reviled as " stilted " and formal by those who have not the 
gift of literary detachment, again possesses the universal quality, 
and, save in the merest externals, is neither ancient nor 
modern. 

For the moment, however, Miss Austen's example had not 
so much little influence as none at all. A more powerful and 
popular force, coming immediately afterwards and coinciding with 
the bent of general taste, threw for the time the whole current 
of English novel writing into quite a different channel ; and it 
was not till the first rush of this current had expended itself, 
after an interval of thirty or forty years, that the novel, as 
distinguished from the romance and from nondescript styles 
partaking now of the romance itself, now of something like the 
eighteenth century story, engaged the popular ear. This new 
development was the historical novel proper ; and the hand that 
started it at last was that of Scott. At last — for both men and 
women had been trying to write historical novels for about 
two thousand years, and for some twenty or thirty the attempts 
had come tolerably thick and fast. But before Scott no one, 
ancient or modern, Englishman or foreigner, had really succeeded. 
In the first place, until the eighteenth century was pretty far 
advanced, the conception and the knowledge of history as distin- 
guished from the mere writing and reading of chronicles had been 
in a very rudimentary condition. Exceedingly few historians and 
no readers of history, as a class and as a rule, had practised or 



132 THE NEW FICTION 



acquired the art of looking at bygone ages with any attempt to 
realise and revive the ideas of those ages themselves, or even, 
while looking at them with the eyes of the present, to keep in 
mind that these were quite different eyes from those of contem- 
poraries. In the same way no attempt at getting " local colour," 
at appropriateness of dialect, and so forth, had been made. These 
negligences in the hands of genius had been as unimportant 
as the negligences of genius always are. If Shakespeare's " godlike 
Romans " are not entirely free from anachronism, nobody of 
sense would exchange them for anything else than themselves ; 
and though Dante practically repeated in the Commedia the 
curious confusion which in less gifted trouveres and romances 
mixed up Alexander with Charlemagne and blended Greek and 
Gothic notions in one inextricable tangle, this also was supremely 
unimportant, if not even in a manner interesting. But when, 
at the end of the eighteenth century, writers, of secondary pow- 
ers at best, engaging in a new and unengineered way, endeav- 
oured to write historical novels, they all, from Godwin and 
Mrs. Radcliffe to Miss Reeves and the Misses Lee, made the 
merest gallimaufries of inaccurate history, questionable fiction, 
manners heedlessly jumbled, and above all dialogue destitute 
of the slightest semblance of verisimilitude, and drawn chiefly 
from that of the decadent tragic and comic drama of the 
time. 

It is not possible — it never is in such cases — to give a very 
exact account of the causes which led Walter Scott, when the 
public seemed to be a little tiring of the verse-romances which 
have been discussed in the last chapter, to take to romances in 
prose. The example of Miss Edgeworth, if a true cause at all, 
could affect only his selection of Scotch manners to illustrate 
his histories, not his adoption of the historical style itself. But 
he did adopt it ; and, fishing out from an old desk the beginnings 
of a story which he had left unfinished, or rather had scarce 
commenced, years earlier, he fashioned it into JVaverley. This 
appearing in the year 1814 at a serious crisis in his own affairs, 



SCOTT'S NOVELS 133 



opened at once a new career of fame and fortune to him, and a 
previously unknown field of exploit and popularity to the English 
novel. 

The extraordinary greatness of Scott — who in everything but 
pure style, and the expression of the highest raptures of love, 
thought, and nature, ranks with the greatest writers of the world — 
is not better indicated by any single fact than by the fact that it 
is impossible to describe his novels in any simple formula. He 
practically created the historical novel ; and, what is more, he 
elaborated it to such an extent that no really important additions 
to his scheme have been made since. But not all his novels are 
historical. The two which immediately succeeded Waverley, and 
which perhaps the best judges consider his best, — Guy Mannering 
and The Antiquary, — have only the faintest touch of history about 
them, and might have none at all without affecting their excel- 
lence ; while one of the most powerful of his later books, Si. 
RonarCs Well, is almost absolutely virgin of fact. So also, though 
his incomparable delineation of national manners, speech, and 
character, of the cosas de Escocia generally, is one of the principal 
sources of his interest, Ivanhoe, which has perhaps been the most 
popular of all his books, Kenilworth, which is not far below it 
in popularity or in merit, and one or two others, have nothing at 
all of Scotland in them; and the altogether admirable romance of 
Quentin Durward, one of his four or five masterpieces, so little 
that what there is plays the smallest part in the success. So yet 
again, historical novelist as Scott is, and admirably as he has 
utilised and revivified history, he is by no means an extremely 
accurate historical scholar, and is wont not merely to play tricks 
with history to suit his story, — that is probably always allowable, — 
but to commit anachronisms which are quite unnecessary and 
even a little teasing. 

There is no doubt that the single gift underlying all these 
and other things — the gift which enabled Scott not merely, as has 
been said, to create the historical novel, but to give the novel 
generally an entirely new start and direction, to establish its 



134 THE NEW FICTION 



popularity, to clear its reputation from the smirch of frivolity on 
the one side and immorality on the other, to put it in the position 
occupied at other times or in other countries by the drama and 
the sermon, and to make it a rival of the very newspaper which 
was being refashioned at the same moment, while providing 
opportunities for the production of literature proper not inferior 
to those of any literary kind except poetry — that this was a gift of 
higher scope, if of vaguer definition, than any of those referred 
to. It was that gift which no one except Shakespeare has ever 
possessed in larger measure, though others have possessed it in 
greater partial intensity and perfection — the gift of communicating 
life to the persons, the story, the dialogue. To some extent Scott 
had this treasure in an earthen vessel. He could not, like 
Thackeray, like Fielding, like Miss Austen even, make everybody 
that he touched alive : his heroes very generally are examples to 
the contrary. And as a rule, when he did perform this function 
of the wizard, — a name given to him by a more than popular 
appropriateness, — he usually did it, not by the accumulation of a 
vast number of small strokes, but by throwing on the canvas, or 
rather panel, large outlines, free sweeps of line, and breadths 
of colour, instinct with vivacity and movement. Yet he managed 
wholly to avoid that fault of some creative imaginations which 
consists in personifying and individualising their figures by some 
easily recognisable label of mannerism. Even his most mannered 
characters, his humourists in the seventeenth century sense, of 
whom Dugald Dalgetty is the prince and chief — the true com- 
mander of the whole stift of this Dunkehpiel — stand poles asunder 
from those inventions of Dickens and of some others who are 
ticketed for us by a gesture or a phrase repeated ad nauseam. 
And this gift probably is most closely connected with another : the 
extraordinary variety of Scott's scene, character, and — so far 
as the term is applicable to his very effective but rather loose 
fashion of story-telling — plot. It is a common and a just complaint 
of novelists, especially when they are fertile rather than barren, 
that with them scene, plot, and character all run into a kind of 



SCOTT'S NOVELS 135 



mould, that their stories with a little trouble can be thrown into a 
sort of common form, that their persons simply " change from 
the blue bed to the brown," and that the blue and brown beds 
themselves are seen, under their diverse colours, to have a singular 
and not very welcome uniformity of pattern and furniture. Even 
Scott does not escape this almost invariable law of the brain- 
artist : it is one of the sole Shakespearian characteristics that 
Shakespeare does escape it entirely and altogether. A certain 
form of huddled and not altogether probable catastrophe, a knack 
of introducing in the earlier part of the story, as if big with fate, 
personages who afterwards play but a subordinate part, and one 
or two other things, might be urged against Sir Walter. But, on 
the whole, no artist is less chargeable with stereotype than he. 
His characters are hardly ever doubles ; their relationships (certain 
general connections excepted, which are practically the scaffolding 
of the romance in itself) do not repeat themselves ; the back- 
grounds, however much or however little strict local colour they 
may have, are always sufficiently differentiated. They have the 
variety, as they have the truth, of nature. 

No detailed account can here be attempted of the marvellous 
rapidity and popularity of the series of novels from the appearance 
of Waverley till just before the author's death eighteen years later. 
The anecdotage of the matter is enormous. The books were from 
the first anonymous, and for some time the secret of their author- 
ship was carefully and on the whole successfully preserved. Even 
several years after the beginning, so acute a judge as Hazlitt, 
though he did not entertain, thought it necessary seriously to 
discuss, the suggestion that Godwin wrote them, — a suggestion 
which, absurd as, with our illegitimate advantage of distance and 
perspective, we see it to be, was less nonsensical than it seems to 
those who forget that at the date of the appearance of Waverley 
there was no novelist who could have been selected with more 
plausibility. After a time this and that were put together, and a 
critic of the name of Adolphus constructed an argument of much 
ingenuity and shrewdness to show that the author of Marmion 



136 THE NEW FICTION 



and the Lady of the Lake must be the author of Waverley. But 
the secret was never regularly divulged till Sir Walter's misfortunes, 
referred to in the section on his poetry, made further concealment 
not so much useless as impossible in the first place, and positively 
detrimental in the second. The series was dauntlessly continued, 
despite the drag of the Napoleon, the necessity of attempting other 
work that would bring in money, and above all the strain on the 
faculties both of imagination and labour which domestic as well as 
pecuniary misfortunes imposed. Nor did Scott, it may be fear- 
lessly asserted, though it is not perhaps the general opinion, ever 
publish any " dotages," with the possible exception of Castle 
Dangerous, which was not only finished but begun when the fatal 
disease of the brain which killed him had got the upper hand. 
The introduction to the Chronicles of the Canongate, written in 
1827, is one of the most exquisite and masterly things that he ever 
did, though, from its not actually forming part of one of the novels, 
it is comparatively little known. The Fair Maid of Perth, a year 
later, has been one of the most popular of all abroad, and not the 
least so at home ; and there are critics who rank Anne of Geier- 
stein, in 1829, very high indeed. Few defenders are found for 
Count Robert of Paris, which was in fact written in the valley of 
the shadow ; and it may be admitted that in his earlier days Scott 
would certainly have been able to give it a fuller development and 
a livelier turn. Yet the opening scene, though a little too long, 
the escape from the vaults of the Blachernal, and not a few other 
things, would be recognised as marvellous if they could be put 
before a competent but unbiassed taste, which knew nothing of 
Sir Walter's other work, but was able to compare it not merely 
with the work of his predecessors but with that of his imitators, 
numerous and enterprising as they were, at the time that Count 
Robert appeared. 

In such a comparison Scott at his worst excels all others at 
their best. It is not merely that in this detail and in that he has 
the mastery, but that he has succeeded in making novel writing in 
general turn over a completely new leaf, enter upon a distinctly 



SCOTT'S NOVELS 



different competition. With the masterpieces of the eighteenth 
century novel he does not enter into comparison at all : he is 
working on a different scene, addressing a different audience, 
using different tools, colours, methods. Every successful novelist 
up to his time had, whatever his ostensible " temp, of tale," 
quietly assumed the thoughts, the speech, the manners, even to a 
great extent the dress and details of his own day. And in this 
assumption all but the greatest had inevitably estranged from them 
the ears and eyes of days that were not their own, which days, no 
doubt, were in turn themselves rapidly hastening to change, but 
never to revert to the original surroundings. Scott had done in 
prose fiction what the poets and the dramatists had sometimes 
done, what very rare philosophers had sometimes done likewise. 
Ostensibly going to the past, and to some extent really borrowing its 
circumstances, he had in reality gone straight to man as man ; he 
had varied the particular trapping only to exhibit the universal 
substance. The Baron of Bradwardine, Dandie Dinmont, Edie 
Ochiltree, Mause Headrigg, Bailie Jarvie, and the long list of 
originals down to Oliver Proudfute and even later, their less 
eccentric companions from Fergus Maclvor to Queen Margaret, 
may derive part of their appeal from dialect and colouring, from 
picturesque " business " and properties. But the chief of that 
appeal lies in the fact that they are all men and women of the 
world, of life, of time in general ; that even when their garments, 
even when their words are a little out of fashion, there is real 
flesh and blood beneath the garments, real thought and feeling 
behind the words. It may be urged by the Devil's Advocate, and 
is not wholly susceptible of denial by his opponent, that, after the 
first four or five books, the enormous gains open to Scott first 
tempted, and the heroic efforts afterwards demanded of him later 
compelled, the author to put not quite enough of himself and his 
knowledge into his work, to "pad" if not exactly to "scamp" a 
little. Yet it is the fact that some of his very best work was not 
only very rapidly written, but written under such circumstances 
of bodily suffering and mental worry as would have made any work 



138 THE NEW FICTION 



at all impossible to most men. And, on the whole, it is perhaps 
as idle to speculate whether this work might have been better, as 
it is ungenerous to grumble that it ought to have been. ^For after 
all it is such a body of literature as, for complete liberation from 
any debts to models, fertility and abundance of invention, nobility 
of sentiment, variety and keenness of delight, nowhere else exists 
as the work of a single author in prose. 

It was certain that an example so fascinating in itself, and of 
such extraordinary profit in fame and fortune to the author, would 
be followed. It was said with sufficient accuracy that Scott's novels, 
at the best of his career, brought him in about ^15,000 a year, 
a sum previously undreamt of by authors; while their reputation 
overshadowed not only all others in England, but all others 
throughout Europe. And it is rather surprising, and shows how 
entirely Scott had the priority in this field, that it was not for six 
or seven years at least that any noteworthy attempts in his 
manner appeared, while it can scarcely be said that in England 
anything of very great value was published in it before his death. 
In the last ten years of his life, however, imitations, chiefly of his 
historical style, did appear in great numbers ; and he has left in his 
diary an extremely interesting, a very good-natured, but a very 
shrewd and just criticism upon them in general, and upon two 
in particular — the Brambletye House of Horace Smith, one of 
the authors of the delightful parodies called Rejected Addresses, 
and the first book, Sir John Chiverton, of an author who was to 
continue writing for some half century, and at times to attain 
very great popularity. This was Harrison Ainsworth, and G. P. 
R. James also began to publish pretty early in the third decade of 
the century. James' Richelieu, his first work of mark, appeared in 
1825, the same year as Sir John Chiverton ; but he was rather the 
older man of the two, having been born in 1S01, while Ainsworth's 
birth year was 1805. The latter, too, long outlived James, who 
died in i860, while holding the post of English Consul in Venice, 
while Ainsworth survived till 1882. Both were exceedingly pro- 
lific, James writing history and other work as well as the novels — 



JAMES — AINSWORTH — G ALT 1 39 



Darnley, Mary of Burgundy, Henry Masterton,John Mars ton Hall, 
and dozens of others — which made his fame ; while Ainsworth 
{Jack Sheppard, The Tower of London, Crichton, Rookwood, Old 
St. Paul's, etc.) was a novelist only. Both, especially between 
1830 and 1850, achieved considerable popularity with the general 
public ; and they kept it much longer (if indeed they have yet 
lost it) with schoolboys. But while the attempt of both to imitate 
Scott was palpable always, the success of neither could be ranked 
very high by severe criticism. James wrote better than Ains- 
worth : his historical knowledge was of a much wider and more 
accurate kind, and he was not unimbued with the spirit of 
romance. But the sameness of his situations (it became a stock 
joke to speak of the " two horsemen " who so often appeared 
in his opening scenes), the exceedingly conventional character 
of his handling, and the theatrical feebleness of his dialogue, 
were always reprehended and open to reprehension. Harrison 
Ainsworth, on the other hand, had a real knack of arresting and 
keeping the interest of those readers who read for mere excite- 
ment : he was decidedly skilful at gleaning from memoirs and 
other documents scraps of decoration suitable for his purpose, he 
could in his better days string incidents together with a very de- 
cided knack, and, till latterly, his books rarely languished. But 
his writing was very poor in strictly literary merit, his style was 
at best bustling prose melodrama, and his characters were scarcely 
ever alive. 

The chief follower of Sir Walter Scott in " Scotch " novels — 
for Miss Ferrier, the Scottish counterpart of Miss Edgeworth and 
Miss Austen, was, though his friend, hardly his follower, and 
Marriage was mainly written before Waverley — was John Gait, 
who also has some claim to priority. He was born (2nd May 
1779) at Irvine in Ayrshire, the scene of his best work, but 
passed most of his youth at Greenock. His father was a retired 
West India captain ; and Gait's biographers do not make it very 
clear whence he obtained the capital for the various travels and 
enterprises which occupied his not exactly eventful, but busy and 



i 4 o THE NEW FICTION 



varied life. He had entered the Custom-house ; but went to 
London in 1S04, and tried literature in many forms, and for the 
most part with very little success. While travelling in the Levant 
he met Byron, of whom long afterwards he published a rather 
absurd life ; and after his return home his Ayrshire Legatees 
found welcome and popularity in Blacktvood. This was in 1S21, 
and after five years' busy writing Gait went to Canada in charge 
of a great scheme of colonisation and commerce called the 
Canada Company. This, after fair prospects, broke down com- 
pletely. He came back again, wrote hard, and schemed inces- 
santly. But fortune was not kind to him ; and he died, in a way 
a broken man, at Greenock on nth April 1839. 

Gait, though with some of the national characteristics which 
have not always made Scotchmen popular, appears to have been 
a person of worth and amiability. He got on well with Byron, a 
very uncommon thing ; and from Carlyle, whom he met when 
they were both on the staff of Fraser, he receives unwontedly 
amiable notice. His literary production was vast and totally 
uncritical ; his poems, dramas, etc., being admittedly worthless, 
his miscellaneous writing mostly book-making, while his historical 
novels are given up by all but devotees. He had, however, a 
special walk — the delineation of the small humours and ways of 
his native town and county — in which, if not exactly supreme, he 
has seldom been equalled. The Ayrshire Legatees is in main 
scheme a pretty direct and not very brilliant following of Hum- 
phrey Clinker ; but the letters of the worthy family who visit 
London are read in a home circle which shows Gait's peculiar 
talent. It is shown better still in his next published work, The 
Annals of the Parish, which is said to have been written long 
before, and in the pre-Waverley days to have been rejected by 
the publishers because " Scotch novels could not pay." It is not 
exactly a novel, being literally what its title holds out — the annals 
of a Western Parish by its minister, the Rev. Mr. Balwhidder, 
a Presbyterian Parson Adams of a less robust type, whose 
description of himself and parishioners is always good, and at 



in HOOK 141 

times charming. Sir Andrew Wylie (a fantastic book of much 
good fun and much good feeling), The Entail, and The Provost 
(the last two sometimes ranked next to the Annals), followed 
rapidly, and are all good in a way which has been oddly revived 
of late years by some of our most popular novelists. A better 
writer than Gait, though a less fertile, was Dr. Moir ("Delta"), 
another Blackwood man, whose chief single performance is Mansie 
JVauch, but who wrote both prose and verse, both tales and essays, 
with considerable accomplishment of style, and with a very agree- 
able mixture of serious and comic power. 

Meanwhile, the historical novel did not by any means absorb 
the attention of the crowds of aspirants who hurried to try their 
fortune in the wake of Scott. Lady Morgan (or rather Miss Sydney 
Owenson) did, in The Wild Irish Girl (1806) and other things, 
some " rattling Hibernian stories" quite early ; John Banim (1 798- 
1842) coincided with the two Englishmen and exceeded them in 
gout du terroir; and the Fairy Legends (1826) of Crofton Croker 
( 1 798-1854) are at their best simply exquisite. But the older styles 
continued after a fashion, or underwent slight changes, before the 
novel of purely ordinary life, on a plan midway between Scott and 
Miss Austen, triumphed in the middle of the century. One of 
the most popular of novelists in the reigns of George IV. and 
William IV. was Theodore Hook (1 788-1841), a man of respect- 
able connections and excellent education, who, having made 
himself a favourite with the Regent and many persons of quality 
as a diner-out and improvisatore, received a valuable appointment 
at the Mauritius, laid himself open by carelessness to a prosecu- 
tion for malversation, and, returning to England, never entirely 
escaped from the effects of this, though he was extremely 
successful both as a novelist, and as a newspaper writer and 
editor, in the John Bull chiefly. Some of Hook's political squibs 
and light verses still retain attraction ; and the tradition of his 
extraordinary faculties in improvising both words, music, and 
dramatic arrangement remains. But his novels (Sayings and 
Doings, Gilbert Gurney, Gurney Married, Maxwell, etc.) have 



142 THE NEW FICTION 



become very dead-alive. They have little plot ; a sort of rattling 
adventure in a modernised following of Smollett, which is their 
chief source of interest ; manners true enough to their own day 
to be out-of-date now, but not handled with sufficient art ever to 
regain the attraction of revived antiquity ; and a very careless and 
undistinguished style. 

The first series of Hook's Sayings and Doings appeared in 
1824, the year before that of the novels of James and Ainsworth 
above noticed. Three years later, and five before Scott's death, 
appeared Falkland, the first (anonymous) novel of a writer far 
surpassing any of the hour in talent, and credited by some with 
positive genius. Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer, afterwards 
Sir Edward Lytton-Bulwer, and later still Lord Lytton (born in 
1800), was the youngest son of General Bulwer of Wood Dalling 
and Haydon in Norfolk, while he on his mother's side repre- 
sented an ancient Hertfordshire family seated at Knebworth. He 
was a Cambridge man : he obtained the Chancellor's prize for 
English verse in 1825, and his first books were in poetical form. 
He became a Member of Parliament, being returned in the Whig 
interest for St. Ives before the Reform Bill passed, and in the 
first Reform Parliament for Lincoln, and he held this seat for a 
decade, receiving his baronetcy in 1835. For another decade he 
was out of the House of Commons, though he succeeded to the 
Knebworth estate in 1844. He was returned for Hertfordshire 
in 1852, and, joining Lord Derby's reconstituted party, ranked for 
the rest of his life as a Conservative of a somewhat Liberal kind. 
In the second Derby administration he was Colonial Secretary, but 
took no part in that of 1867, and died just before the return of 
the Tories to power in 1873. 

This sufficiently brilliant political career was complicated by 
literary production and success in a manner not equalled by any 
Englishman of his time, and only approached by Macaulay and 
by Mr. Disraeli. Falkland was succeeded by Pelhani, which was 
published with his name, and which was the first, perhaps the 
most successful, and by far the most brilliant, of the novels in 



BULWER 



H3 



which authors have endeavoured to secure the rank of man of the 
world even more than that of man of letters, taking the method 
chiefly of fashionable, and therefore somewhat ephemeral, epigram. 
Nor did Bulwer (as he was known in the heyday of his popularity) 
ever cease novel writing for the forty-five years which were left to 
him, while the styles of his production varied with fashion in a 
manner impossible to a man of less consummate versatility and 
talent, though perhaps equally impossible to one of a very decided 
turn of genius. The fashionable novel, the crime novel, the romance 
of mystery, the romance of classical times, the historical novel, by 
turns occupied him ; and it is more easy to discover faults in Paul 
Clifford, Eugene Aram, The Pilgrims of the Rhine, The Last 
Days of Pompeii, Ernest Maltravers, Zanoni, Rienzi, The Last of 
the Barons, and Harold, than to refuse admiration to their ex- 
traordinary qualities. Then their author, recognising the public 
taste, as he always did, or perhaps exemplifying it with an almost 
unexampled quickness, turned to the domestic kind, which was at 
last, more than thirty years after Miss Austen's death, forcing its 
way, and wrote The Caxtons, My Novel, and What will he do with 
it? — books which to some have seemed his greatest triumphs. The 
veering of that taste back again to tales of terror was acknowledged 
by A Strange Story, which, in 1861, created an excitement rarely, 
if ever, caused by the work of a man who had been writing for 
more than a generation ; while The Haunted and the Haunters, a 
brief ghost-story contributed to Blackwood's Magazine, has always 
seemed to the present writer the most perfect thing that he ever 
did, and one of the most perfect things of its kind ever done. 
In the very last years of his life, the wonderful girouette of his 
imagination felt other popular gales, and produced — partly as 
novels of actual society, partly as Janus-faced satires of what was 
and what might be — The Coming Race, Kenelm Chillingly, and 
the posthumous Parisians. 

But this list of novels, which does not include by name much 
more than two-thirds of his actual production, by no means 
exhausts Lord Lytton's literary work. For some years, chiefly 



144 THE NEW FICTION 



before he had passed middle life, he was an active dramatist, and 
at least three of his plays — The Lady of Lyons, Richelieu, and 
Money — had a success (not merely passing, and in the first case at 
least permanent) which few if any other plays of the century have 
had. He was always returning to verse, though never with real 
poetical success ; the exceptions which may be urged most 
forcibly being his translations from Schiller, a congenial original. 
He was at one time editor of the New Monthly Magazine. He 
translated freely, he wrote much criticism, — which is often in 
isolated passages, if not so often in general drift and grasp, 
extremely good, — and he was a constant essayist in very various 
kinds. It is probable that if his entire works were ever collected, 
which is not likely, few, if any, authors of the nineteenth century, 
though it be one of unbridled writing and printing, could equal 
him in volume ; while it is certain that very few indeed could 
produce more numerous testimonials of the kind given by 
the immediate, and not merely immediate, success of separate 
works. 

Yet it has been sometimes complained, sometimes boasted, 
that " with the critics Bulwer is dead " ; and it is not very certain 
that with the faithful herd of uncritical readers the first Lord 
Lytton keeps any great place. Even many years ago he had 
ceased to be, if he ever was, a general favourite with those who 
specially loved literature ; and it is rather doubtful whether he 
will ever regain even a considerable vogue of esteem. Perhaps 
this may be unjust, for he certainly possessed ability in bulk, and 
perhaps here and there in detail, far surpassing that of all but the 
very greatest of his contemporaries. Even the things which were 
most urged against him by contemporary satirists, and which it is 
to be feared are remembered at second-hand when the first-hand 
knowledge of his work has declined, need not be fatal. A man 
may write such things as " There is an eloquence in Memory 
because it is the nurse of Hope " without its being necessary to 
cast up his capital letters against him in perpetuity, or to inquire 
without ceasing whether eloquence is an inseparable property of 



in DICKENS 145 

nurses. But he had two great faults — want of concentration and 
want of reality ; and the very keenness, the very delicacy of his 
appreciation of the shiftings of popular taste may seem without 
unfairness to argue a certain shallowness of individual soil, a 
literary compost wherein things spring up rapidly because they 
have no depth of earth, but also because they have no depth 
of earth, rapidly vanish and wither away. The novel and the 
magazine have beyond all doubt given us much admirable work 
which without them we should not have had ; they have almost 
as certainly, and in no case much more certainly than in Bulwer's, 
over-forced and over-coaxed into hasty and ephemeral production 
talents which, with a little more hardening and under less exact- 
ing circumstances, might have become undoubted genius. Senti- 
mental grandiloquence is not by itself fatal : the fashion which 
tempts to it, which turns on it, may return to it again ; and it is 
never impossible to make allowance for its excesses, especially 
when, as in the case under discussion, it is accompanied by a 
rare and true satiric grasp of life. In these early externals of 
his, Bulwer was only the most illustrious of the innumerable 
victims of Byron. But his failure to make his figures thoroughly 
alive is more serious ; and this must be put down partly to 
incapacity to take pains. 

It was nearly ten years after the first success of Bulwer, and 
more than half as much after the death of Scott, that a novelist 
greater than any the century had seen, except Scott himself 
and Miss Austen, appeared. Charles Dickens and Lord Lytton 
became rather intimate friends ; but their origins and early ex- 
periences were curiously different. Dickens' father had been in 
a government office ; but after the Peace he took to the press, 
and his son (born in 181 2), after some uncomfortable early ex- 
periences which have left their mark on David Copperfield, fled to 
the same refuge of the destitute in our times. He was a pre- 
cocious, but not an extraordinary precocious writer ; for he was 
four and twenty when the Sketches by Boz were printed in a vol- 
ume after appearing in the Morning Chronicle. But the Sketches 



146 THE NEW FICTION 



by Boz, though containing some very sprightly things, are but as 
farthing candles to sunlight when compared with the wonderful 
and wholly novel humour of The Picktvick Papers, which (Dickens 
having been first (1836) employed to write them as mere letter- 
press to the sporting sketches of the caricaturist Seymour) appeared 
as a book in 1838. From that time their author had a success 
which in money came second to that of Scott, and which both 
pecuniarily and otherwise enabled him to write pretty much as he 
pleased. So to the last the style of his novels never bore much 
reference to any public taste or demand ; and he developed him- 
self more strictly according to his own bent than almost any 
writer of English who was not born to fortune. During the last 
twenty years of his life, which ended suddenly on 9th June 1870, 
he was a newspaper editor — first of Household Words, then oiA/I 
the Year Round ; but these very periodicals were of his own making 
and design. He made two journeys to America : one very early 
in 1842, with a literary result (American Notes') of very sharp 
criticism of its people; the other late in 1867, when he made 
large sums by reading from his works — a style of entertainment 
which, again, was almost of his own invention, and which gave 
employment to a very strong dramatic and histrionic faculty that 
found little other vent. But his life was extremely uneventful, 
being for its last two and thirty years simply one long spell of 
hard though lavishly rewarded literary labour. 

The brilliancy and the originality of the product of this can 
never be denied. True to his general character of independence, 
Dickens owes hardly anything to any predecessor except Smollett, 
to whom his debts are rather large, and perhaps to Theodore 
Hook, to whom, although the fact has not been generally recog- 
nised, they exist. He had had no regular education, had read as 
a boy little but the old novelists, and never became as a man one 
of either wide learning or much strictly literary taste. His tem- 
perament indeed was of that insubordinate middle-class variety 
which rather resents the supremacy of any classics ; and he 
carried the same feeling into art, into politics, and into the discus- 



DICKENS 147 



sion of the vague problems of social existence which have so much 
occupied the last three-quarters of the century. Had this icono- 
clastic but ignorant zeal of his (which showed itself in his second 
novel, Nicholas Nickleby, and was apparent in his last completed 
one, Our Mutual Friend) been united with less original genius, 
the result must have been infinitely tedious, and could not have 
been in any way profitable. For Dickens' knowledge, as has 
been said, was very limited ; his logical faculties were not strong ; 
and while constantly attempting to satirise the upper classes, 
he knew extremely little about them, and has never drawn a 
single " aristocrat," high government official, or " big-wig " gener- 
al]}', who presents the remotest resemblance to a living being. 
But he knew the lower and lower middle classes of his own day 
with wonderful accuracy ; he could inform this knowledge of his 
with that indefinable comprehension of man as man which has 
been so often noted ; and over and above this he possessed an 
imagination, now humorous, now terrible, now simply grotesque, 
of a range and volume rarely equalled, and of a quality which 
stands entirely by itself, or is approached at a distance, and with a 
difference, only by that of his great French contemporary Balzac. 
This imagination, essentially plastic, so far outran the strictly 
critical knowledge of mankind as mankind just mentioned that 
it has invested Dickens' books and characters with a peculiarity 
found nowhere else, or only in the instance just excepted. They 
are never quite real : we never experience or meet anything or 
anybody quite like them in the actual world. And yet in their 
own world they hold their position and play their parts quite 
perfectly and completely : they obey their own laws, they are 
consistent with their own surroundings. Occasionally the work 
is marred by too many and too glaring tricks of mannerism : this 
was especially the case with the productions of the period between 
1855 and 1865. The pathos of Dickens was always regarded 
as slightly conventional and unreal by critical judges. But his 
humour, though never again attaining the same marvellous 
flow of unforced merriment which the Pickwick Papers had 



THE NEW FICTION 



shown, was almost unfailing ; and, thanks to the gift of projecting 
imaginative character, above noticed, it was never exactly the 
same. 

These and other gifts were shown in a long line of novels 
covering just thirty years, from Boz to Our Mutual Friend; for 
the last few years of his life, disturbed by his American tour, by 
increasing ill-health, and other things, produced nothing but the 
beginnings of an unfinished novel, Edwin Drood. He attempted 
little besides novels, and what he did attempt outside of them 
was not very fortunate, except the delightful Uncommercial Trav- 
eller, wherein in his later days he achieved a sort of mellowed 
version of the Boz sketches, subdued more to the actual, but not 
in the least tamed or weakened. Although a keen lover of the 
theatre and an amateur actor of remarkable merit, he had the 
sense and self-denial never to attempt plays except in an indirect 
fashion and in one or two instances, nor ever in his own name 
solely. His Child's History of England (1854) is probably the 
worst book ever written by a man of genius, except Shelley's 
novels, and has not, like them, the excuse of extreme youth. His 
Pictures from Italy (1845), despite vivid passages, are quite un- 
worthy of him ; and even the American Notes could be dispensed 
with without a sigh, seeing that we have Martin Chuzzlewit. But 
his novels, despite their many faults, could not be dispensed with, 
— no one who understands literary value would give up even the 
worst of them, — while his earlier " Christmas Books " (during the 
fancy for these things in the forties) and his later contributions 
to the Christmas numbers of his periodicals contain some of his 
best fantastic and pathetic work. Pickwick was immediately fol- 
lowed by Oliver Twist, — a very popular book, and in parts a very 
powerful one, but containing in germ most of the faults which 
afterwards developed themselves, and, with the exception of the 
" Artful Dodger," not bringing out any of his great character- 
creations. Nicholas Nickleby (1838) is a story designed to fix a 
stigma on cheap private schools, and marred by some satire as 
cheap as the schools themselves on the fashionable and aristo- 



in DICKENS 149 

cratic society of which to his dying day Dickens never knew 
anything ; but it is of great interest as a story, and full of admirable 
humoristic sketches, which almost if not quite excused not merely 
the defect of knowledge just referred to, but the author's unfor- 
tunate proneness to attempt irony, of which he had no command, 
and argument, of which he had if possible less. His next two 
stories, The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge, were en- 
shrined (1840-41) in an odd framework of fantastic presentation, 
under the general title of Master Humphrey 's Clock, — a form 
afterwards discarded with some advantage, but also with some loss. 
The Old Curiosity Shop, strongly commended to its own public 
and seriously hampered since by some rather maudlin pathos, 
improved even upon Nicholas Nickleby in the humoristic vein ; 
and while Dick Swiveller, Codlin and Short, Mr. Chuckster, and 
others remain as some of the best of Dickens' peculiar char- 
acters of the lighter sort, the dwarf Quilp is perhaps his only 
thoroughly successful excursion into the grimmer and more horrible 
kind of humour. Barnaby Rudge is in part a historical novel, 
and the description of the riots of Eighty is of extraordinary 
power ; but the real appeal of the book lies in the characters of 
the Varden family, with the handmaid Miss Miggs and the fero- 
cious apprentice Tappertit. Sir John Chester, a sort of study 
from Chesterfield, is one of the most disastrous of this author's 
failures ; but Dennis the Hangman may have a place by Quilp. 
Then (1843) came Martin Chuzzlewit, which, as observed, em- 
bodied his American experiences in a manner which may or may 
not have been fair, but which was exquisitely funny. It also 
added the immortal figure of Mrs. Gamp (not unattended by any 
means) to the glorious list of his comic creations. It was in 
Dombey and Son (1846-48) that the Dickens of the decadence first 
appeared ; the maudlin strain of The Old Curiosity Shop being 
repeated in Paul Dombey, while a new and very inauspicious 
element appeared in certain mechanical tricks of phrase, and in a 
totally unreal style of character exemplified in the Eagstocks, the 
Carkers, and so forth. Yet Captain Cuttle, his friend Bunsby, 



150 THE NEW FICTION 



Miss Nipper, and the inestimable Toots put in ample bail for 
this also. And it was followed (1849-50) by David Copperfield, 
one of the capital books of English fiction. This was to some 
extent obviously autobiographic ; but, setting some questions of 
taste aside, not unduly so. Even the hero is too real to be 
frigid ; and of the two heroines, Dora, if an idiot, is saved by 
pathos different from that of Paul and Nell, while the insipidity 
of Agnes does not greatly spoil the story, and the commonplace 
theatricality of the Steerforth and Little Em'ly episode can be 
neglected. On the other hand, Miss Trotwood, David Cop- 
perfield's schools and schoolfellows, Uriah Heap (not wholly 
good as he is), and above all the priceless Mr. Micawber, would 
suffice to keep twenty books alive. 

But this book, though by no means Dickens' Corunna or 
even his Malplaquet, was certainly the climax of his career, and 
no impartial and competent critic could ever give him the same 
praise again. In two long stories, Bleak House and Little Dorrit, 
and in a shorter one, Hard Times, which appeared between 1852 
and 1857, the mania of "purpose" and the blemish of mechani- 
cal mannerism appeared to a far worse degree than previously, 
though in the first named at any rate there were numerous conso- 
lations of the old kind. The Tale of Two Cities (1859) has been 
more differently judged than any other of his works ; some ex- 
tolling it as a great romance, if not quite a great historical novel, 
while others see in it little more than mixed mannerism and 
melodrama. Something of the same difference prevails about 
Great Expectations (1860-61), the parties as a rule changing sides, 
and those who dislike the Tale of Two Cities rejoicing in Great 
Expectations, Dickens' closest attempt at real modern life (with 
a fantastic admixture of course), and in its heroine, Estella, his 
almost sole creation of a live girl. Our Mutual Friend ( 1864-65 ) , 
though not a return to the great days, brought these parties some- 
what together again, thanks to the Doll's Dressmaker and Rogue 
Riderhood. And then, for it is impossible to found any sound 
critical judgment on the fragment of Edwin Drood, the building 



THACKERAY 151 



of the most extraordinary monument of the fantastic in literature 
ceased abruptly. 

That exactly the same fate befell the great successor, rival, and 
foil of Dickens in novel writing during the middle of the century 
was due to no metaphysical aid but to the simple and prosaic 
fact that at the time publication in parts, independently or in 
perodicals, was the usual method. Although the life of William 
Makepeace Thackeray was as little eventful as Dickens' own, 
their origin and circumstances were as different as their work. 
Dickens, as has been said, was born in distinctly the lower section 
of the middle class, and had, if any education, a very irregular one. 
Thackeray, who was born at Calcutta in 181 1, belonged to a 
good family, regularly connected with English public schools and 
universities, inherited a small but comfortable fortune, and was 
himself educated at the Charterhouse and at Trinity College, 
Cambridge, though he took no degree. Unsuccessful as an 
artist (it is one of the chief pieces of literary anecdote of our 
times that he offered himself fruitlessly to Dickens as an illustra- 
tor), and having by imprudence or accident lost his private 
means, he began to write, especially in the then new and au- 
dacious Fraser's Magazine. For this, for other periodicals, and 
for Punch later, he performed a vast amount of miscellaneous 
work, part only of which, even with the considerable addition 
made some ten years ago, has ever been enshrined in his collected 
works. It is all very remarkable, and can easily be seen now to 
be quite different from any other work of the time (the later 
thirties) ; but it is very unequal and distinctly uncertain in touch. 
These qualities or defects also appear in his first publications in 
volume — the Paris (1840) and Irish (1843) Sketch Books, and 
the novels of Catherine and Barry Lyndon. The Punch work 
(which included the famous Book of Snobs and the admirable 
attempts in misspelling on the model of Swift and Smollett known 
as the Memoirs of Mr. Yellowplush, with much else) marked a 
distinct advance in firmness of handling and raciness of humour ; 
while the author, who, though now a very poor man, had access to 



152 THE NEW FICTION 



the best society, was constantly adding to his stock of observation 
as well as to his literary practice. It was not, however, till 1846, 
when he began Vanity Fair, that any very large number of 
persons began to understand what a star had risen in English 
letters; nor can even Vanity Fair be said to have had any 
enormous popularity, though its author's powers were shown 
in a different way during its publication in parts by the appear- 
ance of a third sketch book, the Journey from Comhill to Grand 
Cairo, more perfect than either of its forerunners, and by 
divers extremely brilliant Christmas books. Vanity Fair was 
succeeded in 1849 (for Thackeray, a man fond of society and a 
little indolent, was fortunately never a very rapid writer) by 
Pendennis, which holds as autobiography, though not perhaps 
in creative excellence, the same place among his works as 
Copperfield does among those of Dickens. Several slighter things 
accompanied or followed this, Thackeray showing himself at 
once an admirable lecturer, and an admirable though not always 
quite judicial critic, in a series of discourses afterwards published 
as a volume on The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century. 
But it was not till 1852 that the marvellous historical novel of 
Esmond — the greatest book in its own special kind ever written 
— appeared, and showed at once the fashion in which the author 
had assimilated the Queen Anne period and his grasp of charac- 
ter and story. He returned to modern times in The Newcomes 
(1853-55), which some put at the head of his work as a contempo- 
rary painter of manners. After this he had seven years of life 
which were well filled. He followed up Esmond with The Virginians 
(1857-58), a novel of the third quarter of the eighteenth century, 
which has not been generally rated high, but which contains some 
of his very best things ; he went to America and lectured on The 
Four Georges (lectures again brilliant in their kind) ; he became 
(i860) editor of the Comhill Magazine and wrote in it two stories, 
Lovel the Widower and Philip; while he struck out a new line in a 
certain series of contributions called The Roundabout Papers, some 
of which were among his very last, and nearly all of them among his 



THACKERAY 153 



most characteristic and perfect work. He had begun yet another 
novel, Denis Duval, which was to deal with the last quarter of the 
century he knew so well ; but he died suddenly two days before 
Christmas 1863, leaving it a mere fragment. He had unsuccess- 
fully attempted play writing in The Wolves and the Lamb, an 
earlier and dramatic version of Lovel the Widower. And during 
almost his whole literary career he had been a sparing but an 
exquisite writer of a peculiar kind of verse, half serious half comic, 
which is scarcely inferior in excellence to his best prose. " The 
Ballad of Bouillabaisse " and " The Age of Wisdo'm," to take only 
two examples, are unmatched in their presentation of pathos that 
always keeps clear of the maudlin, and is wide-eyed if not dry- 
eyed in view of all sides of life ; while such things as " Lyra 
Hibernica " and " The Ballads of Policeman X " have never been 
surpassed as verse examples of pure, broad, roaring farce that still 
retains a certain reserve and well-bred scholarship of tone. 

But his verse, however charming and unique, could never 
have given him the exalted and massive pedestal which his prose 
writings, and especially his novels, provide. Even without the 
novels, as without the verse, he would still occupy a high place 
among English writers for the sake of his singular and delightful 
style, and for the attitude both to life and to letters, corresponding 
with that style, which his essays and miscellanies exhibit. This 
style is not by any means free from minor blemishes, though it 
discarded many of these as time went on. But it has an extraor- 
dinary vivacity ; a manner entirely its own, which yet seldom or 
never approaches mannerism ; a quality of humour for which no 
word would be so fit as the old-fashioned "archness," if that had 
not been so hopelessly degraded before even the present century 
opened ; at need, an unsurpassed pathos which never by any 
chance or exception succumbs to the demon of the gushing or 
maudlin ; a flexibility and facility of adaptation to almost all (not 
quite all) subjects which is hard to parallel. 

And this style reflects with more than common exactness, 
even in these minor works, the attitude above spoken of, which is 



154 THE NEW FICTION 



not less unique and not less inestimable than the style itself. 
Towards some of the " great subjects " Thackeray indeed adopts 
not quite a Shakespearian silence, but a slightly uneasy respect. 
Never irreligious as he was, there was something in him of his 
own beloved eighteenth century's dislike and discomfort in face 
of religious dogma and religious enthusiasm ; he had no meta- 
physical head ; his politics (he once stood for Parliament) were a 
little childish. It was his, in short, not so much to argue as to 
observe, to feel, to laugh with no unkindness but with infinite com- 
prehension, to enjoy, to suffer. Of all the innumerable cants that 
ever were canted, the cant about Thackeray's " cynicism" was the 
silliest and the most erroneous. He knew the weakness of man, 
and laughed at it as the wise knows and laughs, "knowing also," 
as the poet says, "that he himself must die." But he did not 
even despise this weakness, much less is he harsh to it. On the 
contrary, he is milder not only than Swift, but even than Addison 
or Miss Austen, and he is never wroth with human nature save 
when it is not only weak but base. 

All these good gifts and others, such as incomparable power of 
presenting scene and personage to the necessary extent and with 
telling detail, appear in his novels, with the addition of a greater 
gift than any of them — the gift most indispensable of all others to 
the novelist — the gift of creating and immortalising character. Of 
mere story, of mere plot, Thackeray was not a great master ; and 
he has made himself appear a less great master than he was by his 
fancy for interlarding his narratives with long addresses to the 
reader, and by his other fancy for extending them over very 
great spaces of time. The unities are no doubt in fiction, if not 
in drama, something of a caricature ; but it is seldom possible to 
neglect them to the extent of years and decades without paying 
the penalty ; and Thackeray is not of those who have evaded 
payment. But in the creation of living character he stands simply 
alone among novelists : above even Fielding, though his characters 
may have something less of massiveness ; much above Scott, 
whose consummate successes are accompanied by not a few failures ; 



THACKERAY 155 



and out of sight of almost every one else except Miss Austen, 
whose world is different, and, as a world, somewhat less of flesh 
and blood. In Vanity Fair he is still in this respect not quite 
at his acme ; and the magnificent character of Becky Sharp 
(the attempt to rival whom by her almost exact contemporary, 
Valerie Marneffe, is a singular critical error), supported as it is by 
the lesser successes of Jos and Rawdon, of George Osborne and 
Lord Steyne, does not find itself, save now and then, especially in 
the crowning scene of the scandal in Curzon Street, completely 
parted or completely put in scene. And so at the other end of 
the list, from The Virginians, fine as much of that is, onwards, 
it is permissible, without unreason or want of generosity, to discern 
a slight, a very slight, flagging, not in the quality or kind of the 
power, but in the vigour and freshness with which it is applied. 
But in Pendennis, in Esmond, and in The Neivcomes, it appears 
as it does nowhere else in English, or in any literature. It is not 
so much the holding up of the mirror to life as the presentation 
of life itself. Although the figures, the scheme of thought and 
sentiment and sense, differ from what we find in Shakespeare by 
the whole difference between poetry and prose, there is, on the 
lower level, a positive gain in vividness by the absence of the 
restraints and conventions of the drama and the measured line. 
Every act, every scene, every person in these three books is real 
with a reality which has been idealised just up to and not beyond 
the necessities of literature. It does not matter what the acts, the 
scenes, the personages may be. Whether we are at the height 
of romantic passion with Esmond's devotion to Beatrix, and his 
transactions with the duke and the prince over diamonds and 
title deeds ; whether the note is that of the simplest human pathos, 
as in Colonel Newcome's death-bed ; whether we are indulged 
with society at Baymouth and Oxbridge ; whether we take part in 
Marlborough's campaigns or assist at the Back Kitchen — we are in 
the House of Life, a mansion not too frequently opened to us by 
the writers of prose fiction. It was impossible that Thackeray 
should live long or write very many novels when he had once 



156 THE NEW FICTION 



found his way. The lesson of the greatest imagination of his 
great contemporary and master settles that. Not the " Peau de 
Chagrin " itself could have enabled any man to produce a long 
succession of novels such as Vanity Fair and Esmond. 

During the time before the century reached its middle, in 
which Bulwer and Dickens were the most popular of novelists, 
while Thackeray was slowly making his way to the place that was 
properly his, the demand for novels, thoroughly implanted in the 
public by the success of Scott, was constantly met by work of all 
sorts, very little of which survives except in country circulating 
libraries and on the shelves of houses the ownership of which 
has not changed hands for some considerable time. Very 
little of it, indeed, much deserved to survive. Lockhart, an 
exceedingly judicious critic, thought it necessary not long after the 
appearance of Vanity Fair to apologise for the apparent extrava- 
gance of the praise which he had given to his friend Theodore 
Hook by observing that, except Dickens, there was no novelist of 
the first class between the death of Scott and the rise of Thackeray 
himself. But about the time of that rise, and for a good many 
years after it, what may be called the third generation of the 
novelists of the century began to make its appearance, and, as has 
been partly observed above, to devote itself to a somewhat different 
description of work, which will be noticed in a future chapter. 

The historical novel, though some of its very best representatives 
were still to make their appearance, ceased to occupy the first 
place in popular esteem ; and the later varieties of the novel of 
more or less humorous adventure, whether in the rather common- 
place form of Hook or in the highly individual and eccentric form 
of Dickens, also ceased to be much cultivated, save by Dickens 
himself and his direct imitators. The vogue set in for a novel of 
more or less ordinary life of the upper middle class, and this vogue 
lasted during the whole of the third quarter, if not of the second 
half, of the century, though about 1870 the historical novel revived, 
and, after some years of uncertain popular taste, seems in the 
last decade to have acquired almost as great popularity (with its 



MARRY AT 157 



companion study of purely fantastic adventure) as ever. Yet we 
must, before passing to other departments, and interrupting the 
account of fiction, notice not a few other writers of the time 
previous to 1850. 

The descent, in purely literary merit, from Dickens and 
Thackeray, and perhaps from Bulwer, to some of those who 
must now be mentioned, is great. Yet the chief naval and the 
chief military novelist of England need surely not appear by 
allowance ; and if affection and frequent reading count for any- 
thing, it is not certain that some technically much greater names 
might not shine with lesser lustre than those of Marryat and 
Lever. Frederick Marryat, the elder of the pair, was born in 
1792, early enough to see a good deal of service in the later years 
of the Great War, partly under the brilliant if eccentric leadership 
of Lord Cochrane. His promotion was fairly rapid : he became 
a commander in 1815, and afterwards distinguished himself as a 
post captain in the Burmese War, being made a C.B. in 1825. 
But the increasing dearth of active service was not suitable to a 
character like that of Marryat, who, moreover, was not likely to be 
popular with " My Lords " ; and his discovery of a faculty for 
writing opened up to him, both as novelist and magazine editor, 
a very busy and profitable literary career, which lasted from 
1830 to 1848, when he died. Marryat's works, which are very 
numerous (the best being perhaps Peter Simple, Mr. Midshipman 
Easy, and Jacob Faithful, though there is hardly one that has not 
special adherents), resemble Smollett's more than those of any 
other writer, not merely in their sea-scenes, but in general scheme 
and character. Some of Smollett's faults, too, which are not 
necessarily connected with the sea — a certain ferocity, an over- 
fondness for practical jokes, and the like — appear in Marryat, 
who is, moreover, a rather careless and incorrect writer, and 
liable to fits both of extravagance and of dulness. But the spirit 
and humour of the best of his books throughout, and the best 
parts of the others, are unmistakable and unsurpassed. Nor 
should it be forgotten that he had a rough but racy gift of verse, 



158 THE NEW FICTION chap. 

the best, though by no means the only good example of which is 
the piece beginning, "The Captain stood on the carronade." 

The range of Charles Lever, who was born in 1806, was as 
much wider than Marryat's as his life was longer and his experi- 
ence (though in a purely literary view oddly similar) more varied. 
He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and after some sojourn 
both on the Continent and in America became (1837) physician 
to the British Embassy at Brussels. At this time the Continent 
was crowded with veterans, English and other, of the Great War ; 
while Lever's Irish youth had filled him with stories of the last 
generation of madcap Irish squires and squireens. He combined 
the two in a series of novels of wonderful verve and spirit, first of 
a military character, the chief of which were Harry Lorrequer, 
Charles CP M alley (his masterpiece), and Tom Burke of Ours. 
He had, after no long tenure of the Brussels appointment, become 
(1842) editor of the Dublin University Magazine, where for many 
years his books appeared. After a time, when his stores of military 
anecdote were falling low and the public taste had changed, he 
substituted novels partly of Irish partly of Continental bearing 
{Roland Cashel, The Knight of Gwynne, and many others) ; while 
in the early days of Dickens' All the Year Round he adventured 
a singular piece entitled A Day's Ride, a Life's Romance, which 
the public did not relish, but which was much to the taste of 
some good judges. He had by this time gone to Florence, 
became Vice-Consul at Spezzia in 1852, whence, in 1867, he was 
transferred as British Consul to Trieste, and died there in 1872. 

For some years before his death he had been industrious in 
a third and again different kind of novel, not merely more 
thoughtful and less " rollicking," but adjusted much more closely 
to actual life and character. Indeed Lever at different times of 
his life manifested almost all the gifts which the novelist requires, 
though unfortunately he never quite managed to exhibit them all 
together. His earlier works, amusing as they are and full of dash 
and a certain kind of life, sin not only by superficiality but by a 
reckless disregard of the simplest requirements of story-telling, of 



in LEVER — MINOR NOVELISTS 159 

the most rudimentary attention to chronology, probability, and 
general keeping. His later, vastly amended in this respect, and 
exhibiting, moreover, a deeper comprehension of human character 
as distinguished from mere outward " humours," almost neces- 
sarily present the blunted and blurred strokes which come from 
the loss of youth and the frequent repetition of literary produc- 
tion. Indeed Lever, with Bulwer, was the first to exemplify the 
evil effects of the great demand for novels, and the facilities for 
producing them given by the spread of periodicals. 

To descend to the third, or even the lower second class in 
fiction is almost more dangerous here than a similar laxity in 
any other department ; and we can no more admit Lord John 
Russell because he wrote a story called The Nun of Arrouca, than 
we can exhume any equally forgotten production of writers less 
known in non-literary respects. It can hardly, however, be 
improper to mention in connection with Marryat, the greatest of 
them all, some other members of the interesting school of naval 
writers who not unnaturally arose after the peace had turned 
large numbers of officers adrift, and the rise of the demand for 
essays, novels, and miscellaneous articles had offered temptation to 
writing. The chief of these were, in order of rising excellence, 
Captains Glascock, Chamier, and Basil Hall, and Michael Scott, 
a civilian, but by far the greatest writer of the four. Glascock, an 
officer of distinction, was the author of the Naval Sketch Book, 
a curious olla-podrida of "galley" stories, criticisms on naval 
books, and miscellanies, which appeared in 1826. It is not very 
well written, and in parts very dull, but provides some genuine 
things. Chamier, who was born in 1796 and did not die till 
1870, was a post captain and a direct imitator of Marryat, as 
also was Captain Howard, Marryat's sub-editor for a time on the 
Metropolitan, and the part author with him of some books which 
have caused trouble to bibliographers. Chamier's books — Ben 
Brace, The Arcthusa, Tom Bowling, etc. — are better than How- 
ard's Rattlin the Reefer (commonly ascribed to Marryat), Jack 
Ashton, and others, but neither can be called a master. 



i6o THE NEW FICTION 



Captain Basil Hall, who was born of a good Scotch family 
at Edinburgh in 17S8 and died at Haslar Hospital in 1844, 
was a better writer than either of these three ; but he dealt 
in travels, not novels, and appears here as a sort of honorary 
member of the class. His Travels in America was one of the 
books which, in the second quarter of the century, rightly or 
wrongly, excited American wrath against Englishmen ; but his last 
book, Fragments of Voyages and Travels, was his most popular 
and perhaps his best. Captain Basil Hall was a very amiable 
person, and though perhaps a little flimsy as a writer, is yet cer- 
tainly not to be spoken of with harshness. 

A very much stronger talent than any of these was Michael 
Scott, who was born in Glasgow in 1789 and died in 1835, having 
passed the end of his boyhood and the beginning of his manhood 
in Jamaica. He employed his experiences in composing for 
Blackwood's Magazine, and afterwards reducing to book shape, 
the admirable miscellanies in fiction entitled Tom Cringle's Log 
and The Cruise of the Midge, which contain some of the best 
fighting, fun, tropical scenery, and description generally, to be 
found outside the greatest masters. Very little is known of Scott, 
and he wrote nothing else. 

One unique figure remains to be noticed among novelists of 
the first half of the century, though as a matter of fact his last 
novel was not published till within twenty years of its close. 
Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, belongs, as a special 
person, to another story than this. But this would be very incom- 
plete without him and his novels. They were naturally written 
for the most part before, in 1852, he was called to the leadership 
of the House of Commons, but in two vacations of office later he 
added to them Lothair (18 70) and Endymion ( 1 SS 1 ) . It is, how- 
ever, in his earlier work that his chief virtue is to be found. It 
is especially in its first division, — the stories of Vivian Grey, The 
Young Duke, Contarini Fleming, Alroy, Venetia, and Henrietta 
Temple, — published between 1S2 7 and 1S37. They are more like 
Bulwer's than like anybody else's work, but Vivian Grey appeared 



DISRAELI — PEACOCK 161 



in the same year with Falkland and before Pelham. Later novels 
— Coningsby ( 1 844) , Sybil (1845), and Tancred ( 1 84 7 ) — are more 
directly political ; while certain smaller and chiefly early tales — 
Ixion, The Infernal Marriage, Popanilla, etc. — are pure fantasy 
pieces with a satirical intent, and the first of them is, with perhaps 
Bedford's Vathek as a companion, the most brilliant thing of its 
kind in English. In these more particularly, but in all more or 
less, a strong Voltairian influence is perceptible ; but on the 
whole the set of books may be said to be like nothing else. They 
have grave faults, being sometimes tawdry in phrase and imagery, 
sometimes too personal, frequently a little unreal, and scarcely 
ever finally and completely adjusted to the language in which and 
the people of whom they are written. Yet the attraction of them is 
singular ; and good judges, differing very widely in political and 
literary tastes, have found themselves at one as to the strange 
way in which the reader comes back to them as he advances in 
life, and as to the marvellous cleverness which they display. Let 
it be added that Henrietta Temple, a mere and sheer love story 
written in a dangerous style of sentimentalism, is one of the most 
effective things of its kind in English, and holds its ground despite 
all drawbacks of fashion in speech and manners, which never tell 
more heavily than in the case of a book of the kind ; while in 
Venetia the story of Byron is handled with remarkable closeness, 
and yet in good taste. 

Two other novelists belonging to the first half of the century, 
and standing even further out of the general current than did 
Disraeli, both of them also possessing greater purely literary genius 
than his, must also be mentioned here. Thomas Love Peacock, 
the elder of them, born a long way within the eighteenth century 
(in 1785), passed a studious though irregularly educated youth 
and an idle early manhood, but at a little more than thirty (181 7) 
produced, after some verse, the curious little satirical romance of 
Headlong Hall. This he followed up with others — Melincourt, 
Nightmare Abbey, Maid Marian, The Misfortunes of Elphin, and 
Crotchet Castle — at no great intervals until 1830, after which, 

M 



i62 THE NEW FICTION 



having in the meantime been appointed to a valuable and im- 
portant office under the East India Company, he published no 
other book for thirty years. Then in i860 he put forth Gryll 
Grange, and some five years later died, a very old man, in 1866. 
Peacock at all times was a writer of verse, and the songs which 
diversify his novels are among their most delightful features ; but 
his more ambitious poetical efforts, which date from his earlier 
years, The Genius of the Thames and Rhododaphne, are not of 
much mark. The novels themselves, however, have a singular 
relish, and are written in a style always piquant and attractive 
and latterly quite admirable. They may all be described as 
belonging to the fantastic-satirical order of which the French tale- 
tellers (instigated, however, by an Englishman, Anthony Hamil- 
ton) had set the example during the previous century. Social, 
political, economic, and other fads and crazes are all touched in 
them ; but this satire is combined with a strictly realistic presenta- 
tion of character, and, except in the romances of Maid Marian 
and Elphin, with actual modern manners. Peacock's satire is 
always very sharp, and in his earlier books a little rough as well ; 
but as he went on he acquired urbanity without losing point, and 
became one of the most consummate practitioners of Lucianic 
humour adjusted to the English scheme and taste. More than 
thirty years after date Gryll Grange is not obsolete even as a 
picture of manners ; while Crotchet Castle, obsolete in a few exter- 
nals, is as fresh as ever in substance, owing to its close grasp of 
essential humanity. In verse Peacock was the last, and one of 
the best, of the masters of the English drinking-song ; and some 
of his examples are unmatched for their mixture of joviality, taste, 
sense, and wit. 

George Borrow, who was eighteen years Peacock's junior, and 
outlived him by fifteen, was a curious counterpart-analogue to 
him. Like Peacock, he was irregularly educated, and yet a wide 
and deep student ; but, unlike Peacock, he devoted himself not so 
much to the ancient as to the more out-of-the-way modern tongues, 
and became a proficient not merely in Welsh, the Scandinavian 



in BORROW — MISS MARTINEAU 163 

tongues, Russian, Spanish, and other literary languages, but in 
Romany or Gipsy, having associated much with the "folk of 
Egypt" during his youth. After some very imperfectly known 
youthful experiences, which formed at least the basis of his later 
novels, Lavengro (1851) and The Romany Rye (1857), he received 
an appointment as colporteur to the Bible Society, first in Russia, 
then in Spain ; and his adventures in the latter country formed 
the basis of a study called The Gipsies of Spain (1840), which 
has much, and a volume of travel and autobiography, The Bible 
in Spain (1843), which has unique, interest. Returning home, he 
married a wife with some money, and spent the remainder of 
a long life in his native county of Norfolk, producing, besides 
the books just named, Wild Wales (1862), and dying in 1881. 
There is, in fact, not very much difference between Borrow's 
novels and his travel-books. The former had at least some 
autobiographic foundation, and the latter invest actual occurrences 
with the most singular flavour of romance. For his mere style 
Borrow was a little indebted to Cobbett, though he coloured 
Cobbett's somewhat drab canvas with the most brilliant fantastic 
hues. But his attitude, his main literary quality, is quite unique. 
It might be called, without too much affectation, an adjustment 
of the picaresque novel to dreamland, retaining frequent touches 
of solid and everyday fact. Peacock's style has found a good 
many, though no very successful, imitators ; Borrow's is quite 
inimitable. 

Harriet Martineau, one of the numerous writers, of both sexes, 
whom the polygraphic habits of this century make it hard to 
" class," was born at Norwich in 1802, and belonged to one of 
the families that made up the remarkable literary society which 
distinguished that city at the end of the last century and the 
beginning of this. She began as a religious writer according to 
the Unitarian persuasion ; she ended as a tolerably active opponent 
of religion. But she found her chief vocation (before, as she did in 
her middle and later days, becoming a regular journalist) in writing 
stories on political economy, a proceeding doubtless determined 



1 64 THE NEW FICTION 



by the previous exercises in didactic story-telling of Miss Edge- 
worth and Mrs. Marcet. These Illustrations of Political Economy 
(1832) exactly hit the taste of their time and were very popular. 
Her less adulterated children's books (of which the best perhaps is 
Feats on the Fiord) and her novel Deerbrook ( 1 839) , owing much to 
Miss Edgeworth in conception, display a good faculty of narrative, 
and she did a great deal of miscellaneous work. As she became 
less religious she became more superstitious, and indulged in 
curious crazes. She lived latterly at the Lakes, and died on 27th 
June 1876. Harriet Martineau was the object of rather absurd 
obloquy from Conservative critics as an advanced woman in her 
day, and of still more absurd eulogy by Liberal sympathisers both 
in that day and since. Personally she seems to have been amiable 
and estimable enough. Intellectually she had no genius ; but 
she had a good deal of the versatile talent and craftsmanship for 
which the literary conditions of this century have produced unusual 
stimulus and a fair reward. 

There was something (though not so much as has been repre- 
sented) of the masculine element about Miss Martineau ; a con- 
temporary Miss M. was delightfully feminine. Mary Russell Mit- 
ford, born at Alresford, the town of Wither, on 16th December 
1786, was the daughter of a doctor and a rascal, who, when she 
was a child, had the incredible meanness to squander twenty thou- 
sand pounds which she won in a lottery, and later the constant 
courage to live on her earnings. She published poems as early 
as 1810; then wrote plays which were acted with some success; 
and later, gravitating to the London Magazine, wrote for it essays 
only second to those of Elia — the delightful papers collectively 
called Our Village, and not completed till long after the death of 
the London in 1832. The scenery of these is derived from the 
banks of the Loddon, for the neighbourhood of Reading was in 
various places her home, and she died at Swallowfield on 10th 
January 1855. Latterly she had a civil-list pension; but, on the 
whole, she supported herself and her parents by writing. Not 
much, if anything, of her work is likely to survive except Our 



MISS MITFORD 165 



Village ; but this is charming, and seems, from the published Life 
of her and the numerous references in contemporary biography, 
to express very happily the character and genius of its author — 
curiously sunny, healthy, and cheerful, not in the least namby- 
pamby, and coinciding with a faculty of artistic presentation of 
observed results, not very imaginative but wonderfully pleasing. 

To these authors and books, others of more or less " single- 
speech " fame might be added : the vivid and accurate Persian tale 
of Hajji Baba by James Morier, the Anastatius of Thomas Hope, 
excellently written and once very much admired, the fashionable 
Granby and Tremaine of Lister, the famous Frankenstein of Mrs. 
Shelley, are examples. But even these, and much more other 
things not so good as they, compose in regard to the scheme 
of such a book as this the numerus, the crowd, which, out of no 
disrespect,, but for obvious and imperative reasons, must be not 
so much neglected as omitted. All classes of literature contribute 
to this, but, with the exception of mere compilations and books 
in science or art which are outgrown, none so much as prose 
fiction. The safest of life (except poetry) of all literary kinds 
when it is first rate, it is the most certain of death when it is not ; 
and it pays for the popularity which it often receives to-day by 
the oblivion of an unending morrow. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERIODICALS 

Perhaps there is no single feature of the English literary history 
of the nineteenth century, not even the enormous popularisation 
and multiplication of the novel, which is so distinctive and 
characteristic as the development in it of periodical, literature. 
For this did not, as the extension of novel writing did, concern a 
single department only. The periodical — it may almost for short- 
ness' sake be said the newspaper — not only became infinitely 
multiplied, but it gradually absorbed almost every department, 
or a share of almost every department, into itself. Very large 
numbers of the best as well as of the worst novels themselves 
have originally appeared in periodicals ; not a very small pro- 
portion of the most noteworthy nineteenth century poetry has had 
the same origin ; it may almost be said that all the best work in 
essay, whether critical, meditative, or miscellaneous, has thus been 
ushered into the world. Even the severer and more academic 
divisions of history, philosophy, theology, and their sisters, have 
condescended to avail themselves of this means of obtaining a 
public audience ; and though there is still a certain conventional 
decency in apologising for reprints from periodicals, it is quite 
certain that, had such reprints not taken place, more than half 
the most valuable books of the age in some departments, and a 
considerable minority of the most valuable in others, would never 
have appeared as books at all. 

The first division of our time, the last twenty years of the 

1 66 



PERIODICALS IN 1800 167 



eighteenth century, though it witnessed a very great development 
of the mere newspaper, with which we have little to do, did not 
see very much of this actual " development of periodical litera- 
ture " which concerns us. These twenty years saw the last 
attempts in the line of the Addisonian essay ; they saw the 
beginnings of some modern newspapers which exist at the present 
day ; they beheld in the Anti-Jacobin perhaps the most brilliant 
specimen of political persiflage in newspaper form that had or 
has ever been seen. But they did not see — though they saw 
some fumbling attempts at it — anything like those strangely 
different but mutually complementary examples of periodical 
criticism which were given just after the opening of the new age 
by The Edinburgh Review (1802) and Cobbett's Weekly Register ; 
and they saw nothing at all like the magazine, or combination of 
critical and creative matter, in which Blackwood was, some years 
later, to lead the way. At the close of the eighteenth century 
such magazines were in an exceedingly rudimentary state, and 
criticism was mainly still in the hands of the old Monthly and 
Critical Reviews, the respective methods of which had drawn from 
Johnson the odd remark that the Critical men, being clever, said 
little about their books, which the Monthly men, being "duller 
fellows," were glad to read and analyse. These Reviews and their 
various contemporaries had indeed from time to time enjoyed 
the services of men of the greatest talent, such as Smollett earlier 
and Sou they just at the last. But, as a rule, they were in the 
hands of mere hacks ; they paid so wretchedly that no one, unless 
forced by want or bitten by an amateurish desire to see himself 
in print, would contribute to them ; they were by no means 
beyond suspicion of political and commercial favouritism ; and 
their critiques were very commonly either mere summaries or 
scrappy "puffs" and "slatings," seldom possessing much grace 
of style, and scarcely ever adjusted to any scheme of artistic 
criticism. 

This is a history of literature, not of the newspaper press, and 
it is necessary to proceed rather by giving account of the authors 



168 THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERIODICALS chap. 

who were introduced to the public by — or who, being otherwise 
known, availed themselves of — this new development of periodi- 
cals. It may be sufficient to say here that the landmarks of the 
period, in point of the birth of papers, are, besides the two 
above mentioned, the starting of the Quarterly Review as a Tory 
opponent to the more and more Whiggish Edinburgh in 1809, of 
the Examiner as a Radical weekly in 1808, of Blackwood 's Maga- 
zine as a Tory monthly in 181 7, of the London Magazine about 
the same time, and of Eraser in 1830. 

It was a matter of course that in the direction or on the staff 
of these new periodicals some of the veterans of the older system, 
or of the men who had at any rate already some experience in 
journalism, should be enlisted. Gifford, the first editor of the 
Quarterly, was in all respects a writer of the old rather than of 
the new age. Southey had at one time wholly, and for years 
partly, supported himself by writing for periodicals ; Coleridge was 
at different times not merely a contributor to these, but an actual 
daily journalist ; and so with others. But, as always happens 
when a really new development of literature takes place, new 
regiments raised themselves to carry out the new tactics, as it 
were, spontaneously. Many of the great names and the small 
mentioned in the last three chapters — perhaps indeed most of 
them — took the periodical shilling at one time or other in their 
lives. But those whom I shall now proceed to mention — William 
Cobbett, Francis Jeffrey, Sydney Smith, John Wilson, Charles 
Lamb, Leigh Hunt as a prose writer, William Hazlitt, Thomas 
De Quincey, John Gibson Lockhart, and some others — were, if not 
exactly journalists (an incorrect, but the only single designation), 
at any rare such frequent contributors to periodical literature of 
one kind or another that in some cases nothing, in most com- 
paratively little, would be left of their work if contributions to 
newspapers, reviews, and magazines were to be excluded from it. 

William Cobbett, not the greatest, but the most singular and 
original of the group, with the exception of Lamb, and as superior 
to Lamb in fertility and massive vigour as he was inferior to him 



COBBETT 169 



in exquisite delicacy and finish, was the son of a very small farmer 
little above the labouring rank, and was born near Farnham in 
1762. He was first a ploughboy, next an attorney's clerk, and 
then he enlisted in the 24th regiment. He served very creditably 
for seven or eight years, became serjeant-major, improved himself 
very much in education, and obtained his discharge. But, by one 
of the extraordinary freaks which mark his whole career, he first 
took it into his head to charge the officers of his regiment with 
malversation, and then ran away from his own charge with his 
newly married wife, first to France and then to America. Here 
he stayed till the end of the century, and here he began his news- 
paper experiments, keeping up in Peter Porcupine 's Journal 'a vio- 
lent crusade against French Jacobins and American Democrats. 
He returned to England in June 1800, and was encouraged by the 
Government to set up what soon became his famous Weekly Register 
— a paper which, after being (as Cobbett's politics had been up to 
this time) strongly Tory, lapsed by rapid degrees into a strange kind 
of fantastic Radicalism shot with Tory gleams. This remained 
Cobbett's creed till his death. The paper was very profitable, and 
for some time Cobbett was able to lead something like a country 
gentleman's life at Botley in Hampshire. But he met with two 
years' imprisonment for a violent article on flogging in the army, 
he subsequently got into money difficulties, and in 181 7 he made 
a second voyage to America, which was in fact a flight both from 
his creditors and from the risk of another Government prosecution 
under the Six Acts. Through all his troubles the Register, except for 
a month or two, had continued to appear ; and so it did to the last. 
Its proprietor, editor, and in the main author, stood for Parliament 
several times, and, after a trial for sedition in 183 1, was at last 
returned for Oldham in 1832. He was not much of a success 
there, and died on 18th June 1835 near Guildford; for he always 
clung to the marches of Surrey and Hampshire. 

Some such details of Cobbett's life are necessary even in the 
most confined space, because they are intimately connected with 
his singular character and his remarkable works. These latter are 



170 THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERIODICALS CHAP. 

enormous in bulk and ofthe most widely diversified character. 
Peter Porcupine fills twelve not small volumes ; the mere selections 
from the Register, which are all that has been republished of it, 
six very bulky ones ; with a wilderness of separate works besides — 
Rural Rides, a History of the Reformation, books on husbandry, 
gardening, and rural economy generally, some on the currency, an 
English Grammar, and dozens of others. Of these the Rural 
Rides is the most interesting in matter and the most picturesque 
in style, while it affords a fair panorama of its author's rugged 
but wonderfully varied and picturesque mind and character ; the 
History of the Reformation is the most wrong-headed and unfair ; 
the currency writings the most singular example of the delusion 
that strong prejudices and a good deal of mother-wit will enable 
a man to write, without any knowledge, about the most abstruse 
and complicated subjects ; the agricultural books and the English 
Grammar the best instances of genial humours, shrewdness, and 
(when crotchets do not come in too much) sound sense. But 
hardly anything that Cobbett writes is contemptible in form, how- 
ever weak he may often be in argument, knowledge, and taste. 
He was the last, and he was not far below the greatest, of the line 
of vernacular English writers of whom Latimer in the sixteenth, 
Bunyan in the seventeenth, and Defoe in the eighteenth, are 
the other emerging personalities. To a great extent Cobbett's 
style was based on Swift ; but the character of his education, 
which was not in the very least degree academic, and still more 
the idiosyncrasy of his genius, imposed on it almost from the 
first, but with ever-increasing clearness, a manner quite different 
from Swift's, and, though often imitated since, never reproduced. 
The "Letter to Jack Harrow," the "Letter to the People of 
Botley," the " Letters to Old George Rose," and that to ''Alexander 
Baring, Loan Monger," to take examples almost at random from 
the Register, are quite unlike anything before them or anything 
after them. The best-known parody of Cobbett, that in Rejected 
Addresses, gives rather a poor idea of his style ; exhibiting no 
doubt his intense egotism, his habit of half trivial divagation, and 



iv COBBETT 



171 



his use of strong language, but quite failing to give the immense 
force, the vivid clearness, and the sterling though not precisely 
scholarly English which characterise his good work. The best 
imitation to be found is in some of the anonymous pamphlets in 
which, in his later days, government writers replied to his powerful 
and mischievous political diatribes, and which in some cases, if 
internal evidence may be trusted, must have been by no mean 
hands. 

Irrational as Cobbett's views were, — he would have adjusted 
the entire concerns of the nation with a view to the sole benefit of 
the agricultural interest, would have done away with the standing 
army, wiped out the national debt, and effected a few other 
trifling changes with a perfectly light heart, while in minor 
matters his crotchets were not only wild but simply irreconcilable 
with each other, — his intense if narrow earnestness, his undoubt- 
ing belief in himself, and a certain geniality which could co-exist 
with very rough language towards his opponents, would give his 
books a certain attraction even if their mere style were less 
remarkable than it is. But it is in itself, if the most plebeian, 
not the least virile, nor even the least finished on its own scheme 
of the great styles in English. For the irony of Swift, of which, 
except in its very roughest and most rudimentary forms, Cobbett 
had no command or indeed conception, it substitutes a slogging 
directness nowhere else to be found equalled for combination of 
strength and, in the pugilistic sense, " science " ; while its powers 
of description, within certain limits, are amazing. Although 
Cobbett's newspaper was itself as much of an Ishmaelite and an 
outsider as its director, it is almost impossible to exaggerate the 
effect which it had in developing newspapers generally, by the 
popularity which it acquired, and the example of hammer-and- 
tongs treatment of political and economic subjects which it set. 
The faint academic far-off-ness of the eighteenth century handling, 
which is visible even in the much-praised Letters of Junius, which 
is visible in the very ferocity of Smollett's Adventures of an Atom, 
which put up with " Debates of the Senate of Lilliput " and so 



172 THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERIODICALS CHAP. 

forth, has been blown away to limbo, and the newspaper (at first at 
some risk) takes men and measures, politics and policies, directly 
and in their own names, to be its province and its prey. 

It is a far cry from Cobbett to the founders of the Edinburgh 
Review, who, very nearly at the same time as that at which he 
launched his Register, did for the higher and more literary kind 
of periodical what he was doing for the lower and vernacular 
kind. I say the founders, because there is a still not quite settled 
dispute whether Francis Jeffrey or Sydney Smith was the actual 
founder of the famous " Blue and Yellow." This dispute is not 
uninteresting ; because the one was as typically Scotch, with some 
remarkable differences from other Scotchmen, as the other was 
essentially English, with some points not commonly found in men 
of English blood. Jeffrey, the younger of the two by a couple of 
years, was still a member of the remarkable band who, as has been 
noticed so often already, were all born in the early seventies of 
the eighteenth century ; and his own birthday was 23rd October 
1773. He was an Edinburgh man; and his father, who was of a 
respectable though not distinguished family, held office in the 
Court of Session and was a strong Tory. Jeffrey does not seem 
to have objected to his father's profession, though he early revolted 
from his politics ; and, after due study at the High School of his 
birthplace, and the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and • 
Oxford (at which latter, however, he only remained a year, deriv- 
ing very little benefit or pleasure from his sojourn at Queen's 
College), he was called to the Scottish bar. He practised at first 
with very little success, and in 1 798 had serious thoughts of taking 
up literary life in London. But he could obtain no footing, and, 
returning to Edinburgh and marrying a cousin, he fell into the 
company of Sydney Smith, who was there with a pupil. It seems 
to be admitted that the idea of a new Review — to be entirely free 
from the control or influence of publishers, to adopt an inde- 
pendent line of criticism (independent, but somewhat mistaken ; 
for the motto Judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitor gives a very 
one-sided view of the critic's office), and to be written for fair 



iv "THE EDINBURGH REVIEW" 173 

remuneration by persons of more or less distinct position, and at 
any rate of education — originated with Sydney Smith. He is also 
sometimes spoken of as the first " editor," which would appear to 
be a mistake. At first (the original issue was in October 1S02) 
the review appears to have been a kind of republic ; the contribu- 
tors being, besides Jeffrey and Sydney, a certain Francis Horner 
(who died too soon to demonstrate the complete falsity of the 
golden opinions entertained of him by his friends), Brougham, and 
some Professors of Edinburgh University. But no such plan has 
ever succeeded, though it has been more than once tried, and 
very soon accident or design showed that Jeffrey was the right man 
to take the command of the ship. The Review was not ostensibly 
a political one at first, and for some years Tories, the greatest of 
whom was Scott, wrote in it. But the majority of the contributors 
were Whigs, and the whole cast of the periodical became more 
and more of that complexion, till at last, private matters helping 
public, a formidable secession took place, and the Quarterly was 
founded. 

From time to time students of literature turn to the early 
numbers of these famous periodicals, of the Edinburgh especially, 
with the result, usually of a certain, sometimes of a considerable, 
disappointment. With the exception of a few things already known 
from their inclusion in their authors' collected works, the material 
as a whole is apt to seem anything but extraordinarily good ; and 
some wonder is often expressed at the effect which it originally 
had. This arises from insufficient attention to a few obvious, but 
for that very reason easily neglected, truths. The inquirers as a 
rule have in their minds much more what has followed than what 
has gone before ; and they contrast the early numbers of the 
Edinburgh, not with its jejune forerunners, but with such matured 
instances as Macaulay's later essays ; the early numbers of the 
Quarterly, not with the early numbers of the Edinburgh, but with 
their own successors. Again it is apt to be forgotten that the 
characteristics of joint-stock periodical-writing make as much 
for general inequality as for occasional goodness. That which 



174 THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERIODICALS 



is written by many hands will seldom be as bad, but can never be 
as good, as that which is written by one ; that which takes its 
texts and starting-points from suggested matters of the moment 
will generally escape the occasional dulness, but can rarely attain 
the occasional excellence, of the meditated and original sprout of 
an individual brain. 

The Edinburgh in its early years was undoubtedly surpassed 
by itself later and by its rivals ; but it was a far greater advance 
upon anything that had gone before it. It had the refreshing 
audacity, the fly-at-all character of youth and of intellectual 
opposition to established ideas ; it was, if even from the first 
not free from partisanship, at any rate not chargeable with the 
dull venal unfairness of the mere bookseller's hack who attacks 
Mr. Bungay's books because he is employed by Mr. Bacon, or 
vice versa. And it had a very remarkable staff, comprising the 
learning and trained intelligence of men like Leslie and Playfair, 
the unrivalled wit of Sydney Smith, the restless energy and 
occasional genius of Brougham, the solid profundity of Horner, 
the wide reading and always generous temper of Scott, and other 
good qualities of others, besides the talents of its editor Jeffrey 
himself. 

Of these talents there is no doubt, though they were initially 
somewhat limited and not seldom misdirected afterwards. Jeffrey's 
entire energies were absorbed by the Review between its founda- 
tion and his resignation of the editorship after nearly thirty years' 
tenure, soon after which, his party at last coming into power, he 
was rewarded first by the Lord Advocateship and then by a seat 
on the Bench. He made a very fair judge, and held the post 
almost till his death in 1850. But his life, for the purposes of 
literature, is practically comprised between 1802 and 1829, during 
which he was far more than titularly the guiding spirit of the 
Review. Recently, or at any rate until quite recently (for there 
has been some reaction in the very latest days), the conception of 
an editor has been of one who writes not very much, and, though 
choosing his contributors with the best care he can give, does not 



IV JEFFREY 175 

interfere very much with them when they are chosen. This was 
very far from being the Jeffreyan ideal. He wrote a great deal, 
— often in the earlier years as many as half a dozen articles in a 
number, — and he "doctored" his contributors' articles (except in 
the case of persons like Sydney Smith, who were of too unconquer- 
able idiosyncrasy and too valuable) with the utmost freedom. At 
the present day, however, his management of the Review is less 
interesting than his own work, which he himself in his later years 
collected and selected in an ample definitive edition. It is 
exceedingly interesting, and for a good many years past it has 
been distinctly undervalued ; the common, though very uncritical, 
mistake having been made of asking, not whether Jeffrey made a 
good fight for his own conclusions from his own premises, but 
whether he approved or disapproved authors whom we now con- 
sider great. From this latter point of view he has no doubt small 
chance. He began by snubbing Byron, and did not change his 
tone till politics and circumstances combined made the change 
obligatory; he pooh-poohed and belittled his own contributor 
and personal friend Scott ; he pursued Wordsworth with equal 
relentlessness and ill-success. And these three great examples 
might be reinforced with whole regiments of smaller ones. A 
more serious fault perhaps was the tone which he, more than any 
one else, impressed on the Review, and which its very motto 
expressed, as though an author necessarily came before the critic 
with a rope about his neck, and was only entitled to be exempted 
from being strung up speciali gratia. This notion, as presumptuous 
as it is foolish, is not extinct yet, and has done a great deal of 
harm to criticism, both by prejudicing those who are not critical 
against critics, and by perverting and twisting the critic's own 
notion of his province and duty. 

Nevertheless, Jeffrey had great merits. His literary stand- 
point was a little unfortunate. Up to a certain extent he had 
thoroughly sympathised with the Romantic movement, and he 
never was an advocate for the Augustan period in English. 
But either some curiosity of idiosyncrasy, or the fact that Scott 



176 THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERIODICALS chap. 

and the Lake Poets were all in different ways pillars of Toryism, 
set him against his own Romantic contemporaries in a very strange 
fashion. Still, in some ways he was a very great critic. His 
faculty of summarising a period of literature has rarely been 
equalled, and perhaps never surpassed ; he had, when prejudice 
of some sort did not blind him, an extraordinary faculty of picking 
out the best passages in a book ; and, above all, he arranged his 
critical judgments on something like a regular and co-ordinated 
system. Even his prejudices and injustices were systematic : 
they were linked to each other by arguments which might some- 
times be questionable, but which were always arguments. And 
though, even when, as in the cases of Keats and Shelley, his 
extra-literary bias was not present to induce him wrong, he 
showed a deplorable insensibility to the finer strokes of poetry, 
he was in general, and taking literature all round, as considerable 
a critic as we have had in English. 

Sydney Smith was a curious contrast to Jeffrey in almost 
every respect except in politics, and even there the resemblance 
was rather fortuitous than essential. The second son of a man 
of eccentric character and some means, he was born in 17 71, was 
sent to Winchester, and proceeded thence to New College, Oxford, 
where he became Fellow and resided for a considerable time ; 
but unusually little is recorded either of his school or of his 
college days. He took orders and was appointed to a curacy 
on Salisbury Plain, where the squire of the parish took a fancy 
to him and made him tutor to his eldest son. Tutor and pupil 
went to Edinburgh, just then in great vogue as an educational 
centre, in 1798; and there Sydney, besides doing clerical duty, 
stumbled upon his vocation as reviewer. He abode in the Scot- 
tish capital for about five years, during which he married, and 
then removed to London, where he again did duty of various 
kinds, lectured on Moral Philosophy, and, when the Grenville 
administration came in, received a fairly valuable Yorkshire living, 
that of Foston. Here, after a time, he had, owing to new legisla- 
tion about clerical absentees, to take up his residence, which 



SYDNEY SMITH 177 



involved building a parsonage. He had repaid his Whig patrons 
by writing the exceedingly brilliant and passably scurrilous Letters 
of Peter Ply m ley on Catholic Emancipation, and he reviewed steadily 
for the Edinburgh, as indeed he did during almost the whole editor- 
ship of Jeffrey. At last Lord Lyndhurst, a Tory, gave him a stall 
at Bristol, and he was able to exchange Foston for Combe-Florey, 
in the more genial latitude of Somerset. The rest of his life was 
fortunate in worldly ways ; for the Reform Ministry, though they 
would not give him a bishopric, gave him a canonry at St. Paul's, 
and divers legacies and successions made him relatively a rich 
man. He died five years before Jeffrey, in February 1845. 

Besides the differences of their Scotch and English nationality 
and education, the contrast between the two friends and founders 
of the " Blue and Yellow " was curiously pervading. Jeffrey, for all 
his supposed critical savagery, was a sentimentalist, and had the 
keenest love of literature as literature ; Sydney cared very little for 
books as books, and had not a grain of sentiment in his composi- 
tion. Jeffrey had little wit and no humour ; Smith abounded in 
both, and was one of the very wittiest of Englishmen. Even in 
his Review articles he constantly shocked his more solemn and 
pedagogic editor by the stream of banter which he poured not 
merely upon Tories and High Churchmen, but on Methodists and 
Non-conformists ; his letters are full of the most untiring and 
to this day the most sparkling pleasantry ; and his two chief works 
outside his reviews, the earlier Peter Plymley's Letters and the later 
Letters to Archdeacon Singleton (written when the author's early 
Whiggism had crystallised into something different, and when he 
was stoutly resisting the attempts of the reformed government to 
meddle with cathedral establishments), rank among the capital 
light pamphlets of the world, in company with those of Pascal and 
Swift and Courier. The too few remnants of his abundant con- 
versation preserve faint sparks of the blaze of impromptu fun for 
which in his day he was almost more famous than as a writer. 
Sydney Smith had below the surface of wit a very solid substratum 
of good sense and good feeling ; but his literary appeal consisted 



178 THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERIODICALS chap. 

almost wholly in his shrewd pleasantry, which, as it has been 
observed, might with even more appropriateness than Coleridge 
said it of Fuller, have been said to be " the stuff and substance 
of his intellectual nature." This wit was scarcely ever in writing — 
it seems to have been sometimes in conversation — forced or 
trivial ; it was most ingeniously adjusted to the purpose of the 
moment, whether that purpose was a political argument, a light 
summary of a book of travels, or a mere gossiping letter to a 
friend ; and it had a quality of its own which could only be 
displayed by extensive and elaborate citation. But if it be 
possible to put the finger on a single note, it is one distinguishing 
Sydney Smith widely from Fuller himself, bringing him a little 
nearer to Voltaire, and, save for the want of certain earnestness, 
nearer still to Swift — the perfect facility of his jokes, and the 
casual, easy man-of-the-worldliness with which he sets them be- 
fore the reader and passes on. Amid the vigorous but slightly 
ponderous manners of the other early contributors to the Review, 
this must have been of inestimable value ; but it is a higher 
credit to Sydney Smith that it does not lose its charm when 
collected together and set by itself, as the more extravagant and 
rollicking kinds of periodical humour are wont to do. It was 
probably his want of serious preoccupations of any kind (for his 
politics were merely an accident ; he was, though a sincere 
Christian, no enthusiast in religion ; and he had few special 
interests, though he had an honest general enjoyment of life) 
which enabled Sydney Smith so to perfect a quality, or set of 
qualities, which, as 'a rule, is more valuable as an occasional 
set-off than as the staple and solid of a man's literary fare and 
ware. If so, he points much the same general moral as Cobbett, 
though in a way as different as possible. But in any case he was 
a very delightful person, an ornament of English literature, such 
as few other literatures possess, in his invariable abstinence from 
unworthy means of raising a laugh, and, among the group of 
founders of the new periodical, the representative of one of its 
most important constituents — polished persiflage. 



ISAAC DISRAELI 179 



The other contributors of the first generation to the Edinburgh 
Review do not require much notice here ; for Brougham was not 
really a man of letters, and belongs to political and social, not to 
literary history, while Mackintosh, though no one would contest 
his claims, will be better noticed under the head of philosophy. 
Nor do many of the first staff of the Edinburgh's great rival, 
the Quarterly, require notice ; for Gifford, Canning, Ellis, Scott, 
Southey have all been noticed under other heads. 

Two, however, not of the absolutely first rank, may be men- 
tioned here more conveniently than anywhere else — Sir John 
Barrow and Isaac Disraeli. The former had a rather remarkable 
career; for he was born, in 1764, quite of the lower rank, and 
was successively a clerk in a workshop, a sailor, a teacher of 
mathematics, and secretary to Macartney on his famous embassy 
to China. After following the same patron to South Africa, Bar- 
row, at the age of forty, became Secretary of the Admiralty, which 
post he held with one short break for more than forty years 
longer. He was made a baronet in 1835, and died in 1848. 
Barrow was a considerable writer on geography and naval his- 
tory ; and one of the pillars of the Quarterly. Isaac Disraeli, son 
of one Benjamin of that name and father of another, seems to 
have been as unlike his famous offspring as any father could be 
to any son. Born at Enfield in 1766, he showed absolutely no 
taste for business of any kind, and after some opposition was 
allowed to cultivate letters. His original work was worth little ; 
indeed, one of the amiable sayings attributed to his friend Rogers 
was that Isaac Disraeli had " only half an intellect." He fell, 
however, pretty early (1791) into an odd but pleasant and profit- 
able course of writing which amused himself during the remainder 
of a long life (he died blind in the same year with Barrow), and 
has amused a vast number of readers for more than a century. 
The Curiosities of Literature, the first part of which appeared 
at the date above mentioned, to be supplemented by others for 
more than forty years, were followed by the Calamities of Authors 
and the Quarrels of Authors (181 2-14), a book on Charles I., 



i So THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERIODICALS chap. 

and the Amenities of Literature (1840). Of these the Curiosities 
is the type, and it is also the best of them. Isaac Disraeli was 
not a good writer ; and his original reflections may sometimes 
make the reader doubt for a moment whether Rogers was not 
more wrong in granting him half an intellect than in denying 
him a whole one. But his anecdotage, though, as perhaps such 
anecdotage is bound to be, not extremely accurate, is almost 
inexhaustibly amusing, and indicates a real love as well as a wide 
knowledge of letters. 

The next periodicals, the founding of which enlisted or brought 
out journalists or essay-writers of the true kind, were Blackwood 's 
Magazine, founded at Edinburgh in 1 8 1 7, and the London Magazine, 
of about the same date, the first with one of the longest as well as 
the most brilliant careers to run that any periodical can boast of, 
the latter as short-lived as it was brilliant. Indeed, the two had an 
odd and — in the Shakespearian sense — metaphysical opposition. 
Scotland and England, the country and the Cockney schools, 
Toryism and Liberalism (though the London was by no means 
so thorough-going on the Liberal side as Blackwood was on the 
Tory, and some of its most distinguished contributors were either 
Tory, as De Quincey, or neutral, as Lamb) fought out their 
differences under the two flags. And by a climax of coincidence, 
the fate of the London was practically decided by the duel which 
killed John Scott, its editor, this duel being the direct result of an 
editorial or contributorial quarrel between the two periodicals. 

Both these magazines, besides being more frequent in appear- 
ance than the Edinburgh and the Quarterly, attempted, as their 
very title of " magazine " expressed, a much wider and more 
miscellaneous collection of subjects than the strict "review" 
theory permitted. From the very first Blackwood gave a welcome 
to fiction, to poetry, and to the widest possible construction of the 
essay, while, in almost every respect, the London was equally 
hospitable. Both had staffs of unusual strength, and of still more 
unusual personality ; and while the London could boast of Charles 
Lamb, of Hazlitt, of De Quincey, of Hood, of Miss Mitford, 



iv LAMB 181 

besides many lesser names, Blackwood was practically launched 
by the triumvirate of Wilson, Lockhart, and the Ettrick Shep- 
herd, with the speedy collaboration of Maginn. 

The eldest of these, and if not the most vigorous, if very 
nearly the least prolific, yet the most exquisite and singular in 
literary genius, was Charles Lamb. He also was of the " Seventy 
Club," as we may call it, which founded the literature of the 
nineteenth century, and he was born in London on 18th February 
1775. He was of rather lower birth than most of its other 
members (if membership can be predicated of a purely imaginary 
body), being the son of a lawyer's clerk and confidential servant; 
but he was educated at Christ's Hospital, and, through the interest 
of his father's employer, obtained, at the age of seventeen, a berth in 
the East India House, which assured his modest fortunes through 
life. But there was the curse of madness in his family, and 
though he himself escaped with but one slight and passing attack 
of actual lunacy, and at the cost of an eccentricity which only 
imparted a rarer touch to his genius, his elder sister Mary was 
subject to constant seizures, in one of which she stabbed her 
mother to the heart. She was more gently dealt with than 
perhaps would have been the case at present, and Lamb under- 
took the entire charge of her. She repaid him by unfailing care 
and affection during her lucid intervals (which were long and 
frequent), and by a sympathy with his own literary tastes, which 
not seldom made her a valuable collaborator as well as sympa- 
thiser. But the shadow was on his whole life : it made it im- 
possible for him to marry, as he evidently would have done if it 
had not existed ; and it perhaps had something to do with a 
venial but actual tendency on his part to take, rather fully, the 
convivial license of the time. But Lamb had no other weakness, 
and had not this in any ruinous degree. The quality of his 
genius was unique. He had from the first been a diligent and 
affectionate student of sixteenth and seventeenth century writers, 
and some of his first literary efforts, after some early sonnets 
(written with Coleridge and their friend Lloyd, and much fallen 



182 THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERIODICALS i hap, 

foul of by the Tory wits of the Anti-Jacobin), were connected with 
these studies. He and his sister wrote Tales from Shakespeare, 
which, almost alone of such things, are not unworthy of the 
original. He executed an Elizabethan tragedy, John Woodvil, 
which is rather better than it has been generally said to be ; and 
he arranged a series (or rather two) of scenes from the Elizabethan 
drama itself, the short, interspersed, critical remarks of which, 
though occasionally a very little fanciful, contain the most ex- 
quisitely sympathetic criticism to be found anywhere in English 
literature. 

It was not, however, till he had well reached middle age that 
the establishment of the London, the later publishers of which, 
Taylor and Hessey, were his friends, gave him that half accidental, 
and yet it would seem necessary, opening which has so often made 
the fame of men of genius, and which apparently they are by 
no means often able to make for themselves. Lamb's poems 
have occasionally an exquisite pathos and more frequently a 
pleasant humour, but they would not by themselves justify a very 
high estimate of him ; and it is at least possible that, if we had 
nothing but the brief critical remarks on the dramatists above 
noticed, they would, independently of their extreme brevity, have 
failed to obtain for him the just reputation which they now hold, 
thanks partly to the fact that we have, as comments on them, the 
Essays of Elia and the delightful correspondence. This latter, 
after being first published soon after Lamb's death in 1834 (nine 
years after he had been pensioned off from the India House), by 
Mr., afterwards Serjeant and Sir Thomas Talfourd, has been 
gradually augmented, till it has at last found an excellent and 
probably final editor in Canon Ainger. 

It is in these two collections that Lamb presents himself in the 
character which alone can confer on any man the first rank in 
literature, the character of unicity — of being some one and giving 
something which no one before him has given or has been. The 
Essays of Elia (a nom de guerre said to have been taken from an 
Italian comrade of the writer's elder brother John in the South 



iv LAMB 183 

Sea House, and directed by Lamb himself to be pronounced 
" EU-ia") elude definition not merely as almost all works of genius 
do, but by virtue of something essentially elvish and tricksy in their 
own nature. It is easy to detect in them — or rather the things 
there are so obvious that there is no need of detection — an ex- 
traordinary familiarity with the great " quaint " writers of the sev- 
enteenth century — Burton, Fuller, Browne — which has supplied a 
diction of unsurpassed brilliancy and charm ; a familiarity with 
the eighteenth century essayists which has enabled the writer to 
construct a form very different from theirs in appearance but 
closely connected with it in reality; an unequalled command 
over that kind of humour which unites the most fantastic merri- 
ment to the most exquisite pathos ; a perfect humanity ; a cast of 
thought which, though completely conscious of itself, and not in 
any grovelling sense humble (Lamb, forgiving and gentle as he 
was, could turn sharply even upon Coleridge, even upon Southey, 
when he thought liberties had been taken with him), was a thousand 
miles removed from arrogance or bumptiousness ; an endlessly 
various and attractive set of crotchets and whimsies, never divorced 
from the power of seeing the ludicrous side of themselves ; a 
fervent love for literature and a wonderful gift of expounding it ; 
imagination in a high, and fancy almost in the highest degree. 
But when all this has been duly set down, how much remains 
both in the essays and in the letters, which in fact are chiefly 
distinguished from one another by the fact that the essays are 
letters somewhat less discursive and somewhat in fuller dress, the 
letters essays in the rough. For the style of Lamb is as indefinable 
as it is inimitable, and his matter and method defy selection and 
specification as much as the flutterings of a butterfly. One thing 
he has always, and that is charm ; as for the rest he is an epitome 
of the lighter side of belles letlres, and not always of the lighter 
side only. 

No one who studies Lamb can fail to see the enormous 
advantage which was given him by his possession of an official 
employment which brought him a small but sufficient income 



i8 4 THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERIODICALS chap, 

without very hard labour. Such literary work as his could never 
be done (at any rate for a length of time) as "collar-work," and 
even if the best of it had by chance been so performed, it must 
necessarily have been mixed, as that of Leigh Hunt is, with a far 
larger quantity of mere work to order. No such advantage was 
possessed by the third of the great trio of Cockney critics, or at 
least critics of the so-called Cockney school ; for William Hazlitt, 
as much the greatest of English critics in a certain way as Lamb 
is in another and Jeffrey in a third (though a lower than either), 
was a Cockney neither by extraction nor by birth, nor by early 
sojourn, nor even by continuous residence in later life. His family 
was Irish, his father a Unitarian minister; he was born at 
Maidstone in 1778. When his father was officiating at Wem in 
Shropshire, in Hazlitt's twentieth year, Coleridge, who at times 
affected the same denomination, visited the place, and Hazlitt 
was most powerfully impressed by him. He was, however, divided 
between art and literature as professions, and his first essays were 
in the former, which he practised for some time, visiting the Louvre 
during the peace, or rather armistice, of Amiens, to copy pictures 
for some English collectors, and to study them on his own account. 
Returning to London, he met Lamb and others of the literary set 
in the capital, and, after some newspaper work, married Miss 
Stoddart, a friend of Mary Lamb's, and a lady of some property. 
He and his wife lived for some years at her estate of Winterslow 
on Salisbury Plain (long afterwards still a favourite resort of 
Hazlitt's), and then he went in 181 2 once more to London, where 
abundant work on periodicals of all kinds, on the Liberal side, 
from daily newspapers to the Edinburgh Review, soon fell into 
his hands. But after a time he gave up most kinds of writing 
except literary, theatrical, and art criticism, the delivery of lect- 
ures on literature, and the composition of essays of a character 
less fanciful and less purely original than Lamb's, but almost as 
miscellaneous. 

He lived till September 1830, the first of those early thirties 
of the nineteenth century which were to be as generally fatal to his 



iv HAZLITT 1 85 

generation of great English men of letters as the seventies of the 
eighteenth had been prolific of them ; and his dying words, " Well, 
I have had a happy life," are noteworthy. For certainly that life 
would hardly have seemed happy to many. He quarrelled with 
his first wife, was divorced from her in Scotland, discreditably 
enough ; published to the world with astounding lack of reti- 
cence the details of a frantic passion for Sarah Walker, a lodging- 
house-keeper's daughter, who jilted him ; and after marrying a 
second time, was left by his second wife. He had never been rich, 
and during the last years of his life was in positive difficulties, 
while for almost the whole period of his second sojourn in London 
he was the object of the most virulent abuse from the Tory organs, 
especially the Quarterly and Blackwood — abuse which, it must be 
confessed, he was both ready and able to repay in kind with hand- 
some interest. He appears to have played the part of firebrand 
and makebate in the John Scott duel already referred to. Even 
with his friends he could not keep upon good terms, and the 
sincere gentleness of Lamb broke down at least once, as the easy 
good-nature of Leigh Hunt did many times, under the strain of 
his perverse and savage wrong-headedness. 

But whether the critical and the unamiable temper are, as 
some would have it, essentially one, or whether their combination 
in the same person be mere coincidence, Hazlitt was beyond all 
question a great, a very great, critic — in not a few respects our 
very greatest. All his work, or almost all that has much merit, is 
small in individual bulk, though the total is very respectable. 
His longest book, his Life of Napoleon, which was written late and 
as a counterblast to Scott's, from the singular standpoint of a 
Republican who was an admirer of Bonaparte, has next to no 
value ; and his earliest, a philosophical work in eighteenth century 
style on The Principles of Human Action, has not much. But his 
essays and lectures, which, though probably not as yet by any 
means exhaustively collected or capable of being identified, fill 
nine or ten volumes, are of extraordinary goodness. They may be 
divided roughly into three classes. The first, dealing with art and 



iS6 THE DEVELOPMENT OK l'l kli >! >1< ' \ I S chap. 

the drama, must take the lowest room, for theatrical criticism is of 
necessity, except in so far as it touches on literature rather than 
acting, of very ephemeral interest ; and Hazlitt's education in art 
and knowledge o( it were not quite extensive enough, nor the 
examples which in the first quarter of this century he had before 
him in England important enough, to make his work of this kind 
of the first importance. The best of it is the Conversations with 
Northcote, a painter of no very great merit, but a survivor of the 
Reynolds studio ; and these conversations very frequently and 
very widely diverge from painting into literary and miscellaneous 
matters. The second class contains the miscellaneous essays 
proper, and these have by some been put at the head of Hazlitt's 
work. But although some of them, indeed, nearly all, display a 
spirit, a command of the subject, ami a faculty of literary treat- 
ment which had never been given to the same subjects in the 
same way before, although such things as the famous "Going to 
a Fight," " Going a Journey," " The Indian Jugglers," " Merry 
England," " Sundials," " On Taste," and not a few more would, 
put together and freed from good but less good companions, make 
a most memorable collection, still his real strength is not here. 

(I real as Hazlitt was as a miscellaneous and Montaignesque 
essayist, he was greater as a literary critic. Literature was, though 
he coquetted with art, his first and most constant love ; it was the 
subject on which, as far as English literature is concerned (and he 
knew little and is still less worth consulting about any other), he 
had acquired the largest and soundest knowledge; and it is that 
lor which he had the most original and essential genius. His 
intense prejudices and his occasional inadequacy make them- 
selves felt here as they do everywhere, and even here it is 
necessary to give the caution that Hazlitt is never to be trusted 
when he shows the least evidence of dislike for which he gives no 
reason. But to any one who has made a little progress in criticism 
himself, to any one who has either read for himself or is callable 
of reading for himself, of being guided by what is helpful and of 
neglecting what is not, there is no greater critic than Hazlitt in any 



iv BLACKWOOD'S MAGAZINE 1S7 

language. I Ie will sometimes miss — he is never perhaps so certain 
as his friends Lamb and Hunt were to find — exquisite individual 
points. Prejudice, accidental ignorance, or other causes may some- 
times invalidate his account of authors or of subjects in general. 
But still the four great collections of his criticism, The Characters 
of Shakespeare, The Elizabethan Dramatists, The English Poets, 
and The English Comic Writers, with not a few scattered things in 
his other writings, make what is on the whole the best corpus of 
criticism by a single writer in English on English. He is the 
critics' critic as Spenser is the poets' poet ; that is to say, he has, 
errors excepted and deficiencies allowed, the greatest proportion 
of the strictly critical excellencies — of the qualities which make a 
critic — that any English writer of his craft has ever possessed. 

lUackwootVs Magazine, the headquarters, the citadel, the place 
if amies of the opposition to the Cockney school and of criticism 
and journalism that were Tory first of all, enlisted a younger set of 
recruits than those hitherto mentioned, and the special style of 
writing which it introduced, though exceedingly clever and stimu- 
lating, lent itself rather less to dispassionate literary appreciation 
than even the avowedly partisan methods of the Edinburgh. In 
its successful form (for it had a short and inglorious existence be- 
fore it found out the way) it was launched by an audacious "skit" 
on the literati of Edinburgh written by John Wilson, John Gibson 
Lockhart, and James Hogg, while very soon after its establish- 
ment it was joined by a wild and witty Bohemian scholar from the 
south of Ireland, William Maginn, who, though before long he 
drifted away to other resorts, and ere many years established in 
Eraser a new abode of guerilla journalism, impressed on Black- 
wood itself, before he left it, several of its best-known features, and 
in particular is said to have practically started the famous Nodes 
Ambrosiana. Of Hogg, enough has been said in a former chapter. 
For the critical purpose of" Maga," as Blacktuood 's Magazi 'ne loved 
to call itself, he was rather a butt, or, to speak less despiteously, a 
stimulant, than an originator; and he had neither the education 
nor indeed the gifts of a critic. Of each of the others some 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERIODICALS 



account must be given, and Maginn will introduce yet another 
flight of brilliant journalists, some of whom, especially the greatest 
of all, Carlyle, lived till far into the last quarter of the present 
century. 

Wilson, the eldest of those just mentioned, though a younger 
man than any one as yet noticed in this chapter, and for many 
years the guiding spirit (there never has been any "editor" of 
Blackwood except the members of the firm who have published 
it) of Maga, must at some time or other have taken to literature, 
and would probably in any case have sooner or later written the 
poems and stories which exist under his name, but do not in the 
very least degree constitute its eminence. It was the chapter of 
accidents that made him a journalist and a critic. He was born 
in 1785, his father being a rich manufacturer of Paisley, was 
educated at the universities of Glasgow and Oxford, came early 
into a considerable fortune, married at twenty-six, and having 
established himself at Elleray on Windermere, lived there the life 
of a country gentleman, with more or less literary tastes. His 
fortune being lost by bad luck and dishonest agency, he betook 
himself to Edinburgh, and finding it impossible to get on with 
Jeffrey (which was not surprising), threw himself heart and soul 
into the opposition venture of Blackwood. He had, moreover, 
the extraordinary good luck to obtain, certainly on no very solid 
grounds (though he made at least as good a professor as another), 
the valuable chair of Moral Philosophy in the University of Edin- 
burgh, which of itself secured him from any fear of want or narrow 
means. But no penniless barrister on his promotion could have 
flung himself into militant journalism with more ardour than 
did Wilson. He re-created, if he did not invent, the Nodes 
Ambrosiance — a series of convivial conversations on food, drink, 
politics, literature, and things in general, with interlocutors at first 
rather numerous, and not very distinct, but latterly narrowed down 
to "Christopher North" (Wilson himself), the " Ettrick Shep- 
herd" (Hogg), and a certain "Timothy Tickler," less distinctly 
identified with Wilson's mother's brother, an Edinburgh lawyer of 



iv WILSON 189 

the name of Sym. A few outsiders, sometimes real (as De 
Quincey), sometimes imaginary, were, till the last, added now and 
then. And besides these conversations, which are his great title 
to fame, he contributed, also under the nom de guerre of Chris- 
topher North, an immense number of articles, in part collected as 
Christopher North in his Sporting Jacket, substantive collections 
on Homer, on Spenser, and others, and almost innumerable single 
papers and essays on things in general. From the time when 
Lockhart (see below) went to London, no influence on Blackwood 
could match Wilson's for some ten or twelve years, or nearly till 
the end of the thirties. Latterly ill-health, the death of friends 
and of his wife, and other causes, lessened his energy, and for 
some years before his death in 1S54 he wrote little. Two years 
before that time his increasing ailments caused him even to resign 
his professorship. 

Wilson — whose stories are merely mediocre, and whose poems, 
The Isle of Palms ( 1 8 1 2 ) and The City of the Plague ( 1 8 1 6 ) , merely 
show that he was an intelligent contemporary of Scott and 
Byron, and a neighbour of the Lake poets — developed in his 
miscellaneous journalism one of the most puissant and luxuriant 
literary faculties of the time ; and in particular was among the 
first in one, and perhaps the very first in another, kind of 
writing. The first and less valuable of the two was the subjection 
of most, if not all, of the topics of the newspaper to a boisterous 
but fresh and vigorous style of critical handling, which bears 
some remote resemblance to the styles of L'Estrange towards 
the end of the seventeenth century, and Bentley a little later, 
but is in all important points new. The second and higher 
was the attempt to substitute for the correct, balanced, exactly- 
proportioned, but even in the hands of Gibbon, even in those 
of Burke, somewhat colourless and jejune prose of the past age, 
a new style of writing, exuberant in diction, semi-poetical in 
rhythm, confounding, or at least alternating very sharply between, 
the styles of high-strung enthusiasm and extravagant burlesque, 
and setting at naught all precepts of the immediate elders. It 



igo THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERIODICALS chap. 

would be too much, no doubt, to attribute the invention of this 
style to Wilson. It was "in the air"; it was the inevitable 
complement of romantic diction in poetry ; it had been antici- 
pated to some extent by others, and it displayed itself in various 
forms almost simultaneously in the hands of Landor, who kept 
to a more classical form, and of De Quincey, who was modern. 
But Wilson, unless in conversation with De Quincey, cannot be said 
to have learnt it from any one else : he preceded most in the time, 
and greatly exceeded all in the bulk and influence of his exercises, 
owing to his position on the staff of a popular and widely-read 
periodical. 

The defect of both these qualities of Wilson's style (a defect 
which extends largely to the matter of his writings in criticism 
and in other departments) was a defect of sureness of taste ; while 
his criticism was more vigorous than safe. Except his Toryism 
(which, however, was shot with odd flashes of democratic senti- 
ment and a cross-vein of crotchety dislike not to England but 
to London), he had not many pervading prejudices. But at the 
same time he had not many clear principles : he was the slave 
of whim and caprice in his individual opinions ; and he never 
seems to have been able to distinguish between a really fine 
thing and a piece of fustian, between an urbane jest and a piece 
of gross buffoonery, between eloquence and rant, between a 
reasoned condemnation and a spiteful personal fling. Accord- 
ingly the ten reprinted volumes of his contributions to Blackwood 
and the mass of his still uncollected articles contain the strangest 
jumble of good and bad in matter and form that exists anywhere. 
By turns trivial and magnificent, exquisite and disgusting, a 
hierophant of literature and a mere railer at men of letters, a 
prince of describers, jesters, enthusiasts, and the author of 
tedious and commonplace newspaper " copy," Wilson is one of 
the most unequal, one of the most puzzling, but also one of the 
most stimulating and delightful, figures in English literature. 
Perhaps slightly over-valued for a time, he has for many years 
been distinctly neglected, if not depreciated and despised ; and 



LOCKHART 191 



the voluminousness of his work, coupled with the fact that it is 
difficult to select from it owing to the pervading inequality of 
its merits, may be thought likely to keep him in the general 
judgment at a lower plane than he deserves. But the influence 
which he exerted during many years both upon writers and 
readers by his work in Blackwood cannot be over-estimated. 
And it may be said without fear that no one with tolerably wide 
sympathies, who is able to appreciate good literature, will ever 
seriously undertake the reading of his various works without equal 
satisfaction and profit. 

Wilson's principal coadjutor in the early days of Blackwood, 
and his friend of all days (though the mania for crying down not 
so much England as London made " Christopher North " indulge 
in some girds at his old comrade's editorship of the Quarterly), 
was a curious contrast to Wilson himself. This contrast may 
have been due partly, but by no means wholly, to the fact that 
there was ten years between them. John Gibson Lockhart was 
born at Cambusnethan, where his father was minister, on 14th 
July 1794. Like Wilson, he was educated at Glasgow and 
at Oxford, where he took a first-class at a very early age, and 
whence he went to Germany, a completion of " study-years " 
which the revolutionary wars had for a long time rendered 
difficult, if not dangerous. On returning home he was called 
to the Scottish Bar, where it would seem that he might have 
made some figure, but for his inability to speak in public. 
Blackwood gave him the very opening suited to his genius ; and 
for years he was one of its chief contributors, and perhaps the 
most dangerous wielder of the pretty sharp weapons in which 
its staff indulged. Shortly afterwards, in 1819, he published (per- 
haps with some slight assistance from Wilson) his first original 
book (he had translated Schlegel's Lectures on History earlier), 
Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk. The title was a parody on Scott's 
account of his continental journey after Waterloo, the substance 
an exceedingly vivacious account of the things and men of 
Edinburgh at the time, something after the fashion of Humphrey 



192 THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERIODICALS chap. 

Clinker. Next year, on 29th April, Lockhart married Sophia, 
Scott's elder daughter ; and the pair lived for some years to 
come either in Edinburgh or at the cottage of Chiefswood, near 
Abbotsford, Lockhart contributing freely to Blackwood, and 
writing his four novels and his Spanish Ballads. At the end 
of 1S25 or the beginning of 1826, just at the time when his' 
father-in-law's financial troubles set in, he received the appoint- 
ment of editor of the Quarterly Review in succession, though 
not in immediate succession, to Gifford. He then removed to 
London, where he continued to direct the Review, to contribute 
for a time to Fraser, to be a very important figure in literary and 
political life, and after Scott's death to write an admirable Life. 
Domestic troubles came rather thickly on him after Scott's. death, 
which indeed was preceded by that of Lockhart's own eldest 
son, the " Hugh Littlejohn " of the Tales of a Grandfather. Mrs. 
Lockhart herself died in 1837. In 1843 Lockhart received the 
auditorship of the duchy of Lancaster, a post of some value. Ten 
years later, in broken health, he resigned the editorship of the 

Quarterly, and died towards the end of the year. 

Lockhart's works, at present uncollected, and perhaps in no 
small proportion irrecoverable, must have been of far greater 
bulk than those of any one yet mentioned in this chapter except 
Wilson, and not inconsiderably greater than his. They are also 
of a remarkable variety, and of an extraordinary level of excel- 
lence in their different kinds. Lockhart was not, like Wilson, an 
advocate or a practitioner of very ornate or revolutionary prose. 
On the contrary, he both practised, preached, and most formid- 
ably defended by bitter criticism of opposite styles, a manner 
in prose and verse which was almost classical, or which at least 
admitted no further Romantic innovation than that of the Lake 
poets and Scott. His authorship of the savage onslaught upon 
Keats in Blackwood is not proven ; but there is no doubt that 
he wrote the scarcely less ferocious, though much more discrimi- 
nating and better-deserved, attack on Tennyson's early poems 
in the Quarterly. He was himself no mean writer of verse. His 



LOCKHART 193 



Spanish Ballads (1823), in which he had both Southey and Scott 
as models before him, are of great excellence ; and some of his 
occasional pieces display not merely much humour (which nobody 
ever denied him), but no mean share of the feeling which is 
certainly not often associated with his name. But verse was 
only an occasional pastime with him : his vocation was to write 
prose, and he wrote it with admirable skill and a seldom sur- 
passed faculty of adaptation to the particular task. It is indeed 
probable — and it would be no discredit to him — that his reputa- 
tion with readers as opposed to students will mainly depend, as 
it depends at present, upon his Life of Scott. Nor would even 
thus his plumes be borrowed over much. For though no doubt 
the letters and the diary of Sir Walter himself count for much 
in the interest of the book, though the beauty and nobility 
of Scott's character, his wonderful achievements, the pathetic 
revolution of his fortune, form a subject not easily matched, 
yet to be equal to such a subject is to be in another sense on 
an equality with it. Admiration for the book is not chequered 
or tempered, as it almost necessarily must be in the case of its 
only possible rival, Boswell's Johnson, with more or less contempt 
for the author ; still less is it (as some have contended that 
admiration for Boswell is) due to that contempt. The taste and 
spirit of Lockhart's book are not less admirable than the skill of 
its arrangement and the competency of its writing ; nor would 
it be easily possible to find a happier adjustment in this respect 
in the whole annals of biography. 

But this great book ought not to obscure the other work 
which Lockhart has done. His biography of Burns is of re- 
markable merit ; it may be questioned whether to this day, 
though it may be deficient in a few modern discoveries of fact 
(and these have been mostly supplied in the edition by the late 
Mr. Scott Douglas), it is not the best book on the subject. The 
taste and judgment, the clear vision and sound sense, which 
distinguished Lockhart, are in few places more apparent than 
here. His abridgment of Scott's Life of Napoleon is no ordinary 



194 THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERIODICALS chap. 

abridgment, and is a work of thorough craft, if not even of art. 
His novels, with one exception, have ceased to be much read; 
and perhaps even that one can hardly be said to enjoy frequent 
perusal. Valerius, the first, is a classical novel, and suffers 
under the drawbacks which have generally attended its kind. 
Reginald Dalton, a novel in part of actual life at Oxford, and 
intended to lie wholly of actual life, still shows something of the 
artificial handling, of the supposed necessity for adventure, which 
is observable in Hook and others of the time, and which has 
been sufficiently noticed in the last chapter. Matthew Wall, 
tin' last of the four, is both too gloomy and too extravagant : it 
deals with a mad hero. But Adam Blair, which was published 
in the same year (1821) with Valerius, is a wonderful little book. 
The story is not well told; but the characters and the principal 
situation — a violent passion entertained by a pious widowed 
minister for his neighbour's wife — are handled with extraordinary 
1 lower. Peter's Letters, which is half a book and half journalism, 
may be said to be, with rare exceptions (such as an obituary 
article on Hook, which was reprinted from the Quarterly), the 
only specimen of Lockhart's miscellaneous writing that is easily 
accessible or authentically known. He was still but in his ap- 
prenticeship here ; but his remarkable gifts are already appar- 
ent. These gifts included a faculty of sarcastic comment so 
formidable that it early earned him the title of "the Scorpion"; 
a very wide and sound knowledge of literature, old and new, 
English and foreign; some acquirements in art and in other mat- 
ters ; an excellent style, ami a solid if rather straitdaced theory 
o\ criticism. Except that he was, as almost everybody was then, 
too much given to violent personalities in his anonymous work, 
he was a very great journalist indeed, and he was also a very great 
man of letters. 

Thomas de Quincey was not of the earliest Blackwood staff (in 
that respect Maginn should be mentioned before him), but he was 
the older as well as the more important man of the two, ami 
there is the additional reason for postponing the founder of 



DE QUINCEY iy 5 



Fraser, that this latter periodical introduced a fresh flight of 
birds of passage (as journalists both fortunate and unfortunate 
may peculiarly be called) to English literature. De Quincey was 
born in 1 7S5 (the same year as his friend Wilson) at Manchester, 
where his father was a merchant of means. He was educated at 
the Grammar School of his native town, after some preliminary 
teaching at or near Bath, whither his mother had moved after his 
father's death. He did not like Manchester, and when he had 
nearly served his time for an exhibition to Brasenose College, 
Oxford, he ran away and hid himself. He went to Oxford after 
all, entering at Worcester, where he made a long though rather in- 
termittent residence, but took no degree. In 1809 he took up his 
abode at Grasmere, married after a time, and lived there, at least 
as his headquarters, for more than twenty years. In 1830 he 
moved to Edinburgh, where, or in its neighbourhood, he resided 
for the rest of his long life, and where he died in December 1859. 
He has given various autobiographic handlings of this life — in 
the main it would seem quite trustworthy, but invested with an 
air of fantastic unreality by his manner of relation. 

His life, however, and his personality, and even the whole of 
his voluminous published work, have in all probability taken 
colour in the general thought from his first literary work of any 
consequence, the wonderful Confessions of an English Opiuni 
Eater, which, with the Essays of E/ia, were the chief flowers of 
the London Magazine, and appeared in that periodical during the 
year 1821. He had acquired this habit during his sojourn at 
Oxford, and it had grown upon him during his at first solitary 
residence at the Lakes to an enormous extent. Until he thus 
committed the results of his dreams, or of his fancy and literary 
genius working on his dreams, or of his fancy and genius by 
themselves, to print and paper, in his thirty-sixth year, he had 
been, though a great reader, hardly anything of a writer. But 
thenceforward, and especially after, in 1825, he had visited his 
Bake neighbour Wilson at Edinburgh, and had been by him in- 
troduced to Blackwood, he became a frequent contributor to 



196 THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERIODICALS chap. 

different magazines, and continued to be so, writing far more 
even than he published, till his death. He wrote very few books, 
the chief being a very free translation of a German novel, forged 
as Scott's, and called Walladmor; a more original and stable, 
though not very brilliant, effort in fiction, entitled Klosterheim ; 
and the Logic of Political Economy. Towards the end of his life 
he superintended an English collection — there had already been 
one in America — of his essays, and this has been supplemented 
more than once since. 

It may, indeed, fairly be doubted whether so large a collec- 
tion, of miscellaneous, heterogeneous, and, to tell the truth, very 
unequally interesting and meritorious matter, has ever been 
received with greater or more lasting popular favour, a fresh 
edition of the fourteen or sixteen volumes of the Works having 
been called for on an average every decade. There have been 
dissidents : and recently in particular something of a set has been 
made against De Quincey — a set to some extent helped by the 
gradual addition to the Works of a great deal of unimportant 
matter which he had not himself cared to reproduce. This, in- 
deed, is perhaps the greatest danger to which the periodical 
writer is after his death exposed, and is even the most serious 
drawback to periodical writing. It is impossible that any man 
who lives by such writing can always be at his best in form, and 
he will sometimes be compelled to execute what Carlyle has 
called " honest journey-work in default of better," — work which, 
though perfectly honest and perfectly respectable, is mere journey- 
work, and has no claim to be disturbed from its rest when its 
journey is accomplished. Of this there was some even in De 
Quincey's own collection, and the proportion has been much 
increased since. Moreover, even at his very best, he was not a 
writer who could be trusted to keep himself at that best. His 
reading was enormous, — nearly as great perhaps as Southey's, 
though in still less popular directions, — and he would sometimes 
drag it in rather inappropriately. He had an unconquerable 
and sometimes very irritating habit of digression, of divagation, 



DE QUINCEY i 97 



of aside. And, worst of all, his humour, which in its own peculiar 
vein of imaginative grotesque has seldom been surpassed, was 
liable constantly to degenerate into a kind of laboured trifling, 
inexpressibly exasperating to the nerves. He could be simply 
dull ; and he can seldom be credited with the possession of what 
may be called literary tact. 

Yet his merits were such as to give him no superior in his 
own manner among the essayists, and hardly any among the prose 
writers of the century. He, like Wilson, and probably before 
Wilson, deliberately aimed at a style of gorgeous elaboration, 
intended not exactly for constant use, but for use when required ; 
and he achieved it. Certain well-known passages, as well as 
others which have not become hackneyed, in the Confessions of an 
Opium Eater, in the Aiitobiography, in The English Mail Coach, 
in Our Ladies of Sorrow, and elsewhere, are unsurpassed in 
English or out of it for imaginative splendour of imagery, suit- 
ably reproduced in words. Nor was this De Quincey's only, 
though it was his most precious gift. He had a singular, though, 
as has been said, a very untrustworthy faculty of humour, both 
grim and quaint. He was possessed of extraordinary dialectic 
ingenuity, a little alloyed no doubt by a tendency to wire-drawn 
and over subtle minuteness such as besets the born logician who 
is not warned of his danger either by a strong vein of common 
sense or by constant sojourn in the world. He could expound 
and describe admirably ; he had a thorough grasp of the most 
complicated subjects when he did not allow will-o'-the-wisps to 
lure him into letting it go, and could narrate the most diverse 
kinds of action, such as the struggles of Bentley with Trinity 
College, the journey of the Tartars from the Ukraine to Siberia, 
and the fortunes of the Spanish Nun, Catalina, with singular 
adaptability. In his biographical articles on friends and contem- 
poraries, which are rather numerous, he has been charged both 
with ill-nature and with inaccuracy. The first charge may be per- 
emptorily dismissed, the second requires much argument and 
sifting in particular cases. To some who have given not a little 



198 THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERIODICALS CHAP. 

attention to the matter it seems that De Quincey was never 
guilty of deliberate fabrication, and that he was not even careless 
in statement. But he was first of all a dreamer ; and when it is 
true of a man that, in the words of the exquisite passage where 
Calderon has come at one with Shakespeare, his very dreams are 
a dream, it will often happen that his facts are not exactly a fact. 

Nevertheless, De Quincey is a great writer and a great figure 
in literature, while it may plausibly be contended that journalism 
may make all the more boast of him in that it is probable that 
without it he would never have written at all. And he has one 
peculiarity not yet mentioned. Although his chief excellences 
may not be fully perceptible except to mature tastes, he is 
specially attractive to the young. Probably more boys have in 
the last forty years been brought to a love of literature proper by 
De Quincey than by any other writer whatever. 

Of other contributors to these periodicals much might be said 
in larger space, as for instance of the poisoner-critic Thomas 
Griffiths Wainewright, the "Janus Weathercock" of the London, 
the original of certain well-known heroes of Bulwer and Dickens, 
and the object of a more than once recurrent and distinctly 
morbid attention from young men of letters since. Lamb, who 
was not given to think evil of his friends, was certainly unlucky 
in calling Wainewright " warm- as light-hearted " ; for the man 
(who died a convict in Australia, though he cheated the gallows 
which was his due) was both an affected coxcomb and a callous 
scoundrel. But he was a very clever fellow, though indignant 
morality has sometimes endeavoured to deny this. That he an- 
ticipated by sixty years and more certain depravations in style 
and taste notorious in our own day is something : it is more that 
his achievement in gaudy writing and in the literary treatment of 
art was really considerable. 

Wainewright, however, is only "curious" in more than one 
sense of that term : Leigh Hunt, who, though quite incapable of 
poisoning anybody, had certain points in common with Waine- 
wright on the latter's more excusable sides, and whose prose must 



LEIGH HUNT 199 



now be treated, is distinguished. He reappears with even better 
right here than some others of the more important constituents of 
this chapter. For all his best work in prose appeared in peri- 
odicals, though it is impossible to say that all his work that ap- 
peared in periodicals was his best work. He was for fourteen 
years editor of, and a large contributor to, the Examiner, which he 
and his brother started in 1808. After his liberation from prison 
he not merely edited, but in the older fashion practically wrote the 
Reflector (1810), the Indicator (1 819-21), and the Companion 
(1828). His rather unlucky journey to Italy was undertaken to 
edit the Liberal. He was one of the rare and rash men of letters 
who have tried to keep up a daily journal unassisted — a new Tatler, 
which lasted for some eighteen months (1830-32) ; and a little 
later (1834-35) he supported for full two years a similar but 
weekly venture, in part original, in part compiled or borrowed, 
called Leigh Hunt's London Journal. These were not his only 
ventures of the kind : he was an indefatigable contributor to 
periodicals conducted by others; and most of his books now 
known by independent titles are in fact collections of "articles" 
— sometimes reprinted, sometimes published for the first time. 

It was impossible that such a mass of matter should be all 
good ; and it is equally impossible to deny that the combined 
fact of so much production and of so little concentration argues 
a certain idiosyncrasy of defect. In fact the butterfly character 
which every unprejudiced critic of Leigh Hunt has noticed, made 
it impossible for him to plan or to execute any work on a great 
scale. He never could have troubled himself to complete missing 
knowledge, to fill in gaps, to co-ordinate thinking, as the literary 
historian, whose vocation in some respects he might seem to have 
possessed eminently, must do — to weave fancy into the novelist's 
solid texture, and not to leave it in thrums or in gossamer. But 
he was, though in both ways a most unequal, a delightful mis- 
cellanist and critic. In both respects it is natural, and indeed 
unavoidable, to compare him with Lamb and with Hazlitt, whom, 
however, he really preceded, forming a link between them and the 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERIODICALS 



eighteenth century essayists. His greater voluminousness, in- 
duced by necessity, puts him at a rather unfair disadvantage 
with the first ; and we may perhaps never find in him those 
exquisite felicities which delight and justify the true " Agnist." 
Yet he has found some things that Lamb missed in Lamb's own 
subjects; and though his prejudices (of the middle-class Liberal 
and freethinking kind) were sometimes more damaging than any 
to which Lamb was exposed, he was free from the somewhat 
wilful eclecticism of that inimitable person. He could like nearly 
all things that were good — in which respect he stands above both 
his rivals in criticism. But he stands below them in his miscel- 
laneous work ; though here also, as in his poetry, he was a master, 
not a scholar. Lamb and Hazlitt improved upon him here, as 
Keats and Shelley improved upon him there. But what a position 
is it to be " improved upon" by Keats and Shelley in poetry, by 
Hazlitt and Lamb in prose ! 

Hartley Coleridge might with about equal propriety have been 
treated in the last chapter and in this ; but the already formidable 
length of the catalogue of bards perhaps turns the scale in favour 
of placing him with other contributors to Blacktvood, to which, 
thanks to his early friendship with Wilson, he enjoyed access, 
and in which he might have written much more than he did, 
and did actually write most of what he published himself, except 
the Biographia Borealis. 

The life of Hartley was a strange and sad variant of his 
father's, though, if he lacked a good deal of S. T. C.'s genius, his 
character was entirely free from the baser stains which darkened 
that great man's weakness. Born ( 1 796) at Clevedon, the first-fruits 
of the marriage of Coleridge and Sara, he was early celebrated by 
Wordsworth and by his father in immortal verse, and by Southey, 
his uncle, in charming prose, for his wonderful dreamy precocity ; 
but he never was a great reader. Southey took care of him with 
the rest of the family when Coleridge disappeared into the vague ; 
and Hartley, after schooling at Ambleside, was elected to a post- 
mastership at Merton College, Oxford. He missed the Newdi- 



HARTLEY COLERIDGE 



gate thrice, and only got a second in the schools, but was more 
than consoled by a Fellowship at Oriel. Unfortunately Oriel was 
not only gaining great honour, but was very jealous of it ; and the 
probationary Fellows were subjected to a most rigid system of 
observation, which seems to have gone near to espionage. If 
ever there was a man born to be a Fellow under the old English 
University scheme, that man was Hartley Coleridge ; and it is 
extremely probable that if he had been let alone he would have 
produced, in one form or another, a justification of that scheme, 
worthy to rank with Burton's Anatomy. But he was accused 
of various shortcomings, of which intemperance seems to have 
been the most serious, though it is doubtful whether it would 
have sunk the beam if divers peccadilloes, political, social, and 
miscellaneous, had not been thrown in. Strong interest was made 
in favour of mercy, but the College deprived him of his Fellow- 
ship, granting him, not too consistently, a solatium of ^300. This 
was apparently in 1820. Hartley lived for nearly thirty years 
longer, but his career was closed. He was, as his brother 
Derwent admits, one of those whom the pressure of necessity 
does not spur but numbs. He wrote a little for Blackzvood; he 
took pupils unsuccessfully, and school-mastered with a little better 
success ; and during a short time he lived with a Leeds publisher 
who took a fancy to him and induced him to write his only large 
book, the Biographia Borealis. But for the most part he abode 
at Grasmere, where his failing (it was not much more) of occa- 
sional intemperance was winked at by all, even by the austere 
Wordsworth, where he wandered about, annotated a copy of 
Anderson's Poets and some other books, and supported himself 
(with the curious Coleridgean faculty of subsisting like the bird 
of paradise, without either foot or foothold) till, at his mother's 
death, an annuity made his prospects secure. He died on 6th 
January 1849, a little before Wordsworth, and shortly afterwards 
his work was collected by his brother Derwent in seven small 
volumes ; the Poems filling two, the Essays and Fragments two, 
and the Biographia Borealis three. 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERIODICALS 



This last (which appeared in its second form as Lives of 
Northern Worthies, with some extremely interesting notes by 
S. T. C.) is an excellent book of its kind, and shows that under 
more favourable circumstances Hartley might have been a great 
literary historian. But it is on the whole less characteristic than 
the volumes of Poems and Essays. In the former Hartley has 
no kind of souffle (or long-breathed inspiration), nor has he those 
exquisite lyrical touches of his father's which put Coleridge's scanty 
and unequal work on a level with that of the greatest names in 
English poetry. But he has a singular melancholy sweetness, and 
a meditative grace which finds its special home in the sonnet. 
In the "Posthumous Sonnets" especially, the sound — not an 
echo of, but a true response to, Elizabethan music — is unmis- 
takable, and that to Shakespeare (" the soul of man is larger than 
the sky "), that on himself (" When I survey the course that I have 
run "), and not a few others, rank among the very best in English. 
Many of the miscellaneous poems contain beautiful things. But 
on the whole the greatest interest of Hartley Coleridge is that he 
is the first and one of the best examples of a kind of poet who is 
sometimes contemned, who has been very frequent in this cen- 
tury, but who is dear to the lover of poetry, and productive of 
delightful things. This kind of poet is wanting, it may be, in 
what is briefly, if not brutally, called originality. He might not 
sing much if others had not sung and were not singing around 
him ; he does not sing very much even as it is, and the notes of his 
song are not extraordinarily piercing or novel. But they are true, 
they are not copied, and the lover of poetry could not spare them. 

It is improbable that Hartley Coleridge would ever have been 
a great poet : he might, if Fate or even if the Oriel dons had been 
a little kinder, have been a great critic. As it is, his essays, his 
introduction to Massinger and Ford, and his Marginalia, suffer 
on the one side from certain defects of reading ; for his access to 
books was latterly small, and even when it had been ample, as at 
Oxford, in London, or at Southey's house, he confesses that he 
had availed himself of it but little. Hence he is often wrong, and 



MAGINN 203 



more often incomplete, from sheer lack of information. Secondly, 
much of his work is mere jotting, never in the very least degree 
intended for publication, and sometimes explicitly corrected or 
retracted by later jottings of the same kind. In such a case we 
can rather augur of the might-have-been than pronounce on the 
actual. But the two volumes are full of delicate critical views 
on literature ; and the longest series, " Ignoramus on the Fine 
Arts," shows how widely, with better luck and more opportunity, 
he might have extended his critical performances. In short, 
Hartley Coleridge, if a " sair sicht " to the moralist, is an interest- 
ing and far from a wholly painful one to the lover of literature, 
which he himself loved so much, and practised, with all his 
disadvantages, so successfully. 

All the persons hitherto mentioned in this chapter appear by 
undoubted right in any history of English Literature : it may 
cause a little surprise to see that of Maginn figuring with them. 
Yet his abilities were scarcely inferior to those of any ; and he 
was kept back from sharing their fame only by infirmities of 
character and by his succumbing to that fatal Bohemianism which, 
constantly recurring among men of letters, exercised its attractions 
with special force in the early days of journalism in this century. 
William Maginn (1793), who was the son of a schoolmaster at 
Cork, took a brilliant degree at Trinity College, Dublin, and for 
some years followed his father's profession. The establishment, 
however, and the style of Blackwood were an irresistible attraction 
to him, and he drifted to Edinburgh, wrote a great deal in the 
earlier and more boisterous days of Maga under the pseudonym 
of Ensign O'Doherty, and has, as has been said, some claims to be 
considered the originator of the Nodes. Then, as he had gone from 
Ireland to Edinburgh, he went from Edinburgh to London, and 
took part in divers Tory periodicals, acting as Paris correspondent 
for some of them till, about 1S30, he started, or helped in starting, 
a London Blackwood in Fraser. He had now every opportunity, 
and he gathered round him a staff almost more brilliant than that 
of the Edinburgh, of the London, of the Quarterly, or of Black- 



20 4 THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERIODICALS char 

wood itself. But he was equally reckless of his health and of his 
money. The acknowledged original of Thackeray's Captain 
Shandon, he was not seldom in jail ; and at last, assisted by Sir 
Robert Peel almost too late, he died at Walton on Thames in 
August 1842, not yet fifty, but an utter wreck. 

The collections of Maginn's work are anything but exhaustive, 
and the work itself suffers from all the drawbacks, probable if not 
inevitable, of work written in the intervals of carouse, at the last 
moment, for ephemeral purposes. Yet it is instinct with a perhaps 
brighter genius than the more accomplished productions of some 
much more famous men. The Homeric Ballads, though they 
have been praised by some, are nearly worthless ; and the longer 
attempts in fiction are not happy. But Maginn's shorter stories 
in Blackwood, especially the inimitable " Story without a Tail," 
are charming; his more serious critical work, especially that on 
Shakespeare, displays a remarkable combination of wide reading, 
critical acumen, and sound sense ; and his miscellanies in prose 
and verse, especially the latter, are characterised by a mixture of 
fantastic humour, adaptive wit, and rare but real pathos and 
melody, which is the best note of the specially Irish mode. It 
must be said, however, that Maginn is chiefly important to the 
literary historian as the captain of a band of distinguished persons, 
and as in a way the link between the journalism of the first and 
the journalism of the second third of the century. A famous 
plate by Maclise, entitled " The Fraserians," contains, seated 
round abundant bottles, with Maginn as president, portraits (in 
order by " the way of the sun," and omitting minor personages) 
of Irving, Gleig the Chaplain-General, Sir Egerton Brydges, Allan 
Cunningham, Carlyle, Count D'Orsay, Brewster, Theodore Hook, 
Lockhart, Crofton Croker of the Irish Fairy Tales, Jerdan, Dunlop 
of the " History of Fiction," Gait, Hogg, Coleridge, Harrison 
Ainsworth, Thackeray, Southey, and Barry Cornwall. It is improb- 
able that all these contributed at one time, and tolerably certain 
that some of them were very sparing and infrequent contributors 
at any time, but the important point is the juxtaposition of the 



iv THE FRASERIANS — STERLING 205 

generation which was departing and the generation which was com- 
ing on — of Southey with Thackeray and of Coleridge with Carlyle. 
Yet it will be noticed (and the point is of some importance) that 
these new-comers are, at least the best of them, much less merely 
periodical writers than those who came immediately before them. 
In part no doubt this was accident ; in part it was due to the 
greater prominence which novels and serial works of other kinds 
were beginning to assume ; in part it may be to the fact that the 
great increase in the number of magazines and newspapers had 
lowered their individual dignity and perhaps their profitableness. 
But it is certain that of the list just mentioned, Thackeray and 
Carlyle, of the contemporary new generation of the Edinburgh 
Macaulay, of the nascent IVcs/miustir Mill, and others, were not, 
like Jeffrey, like Sydney Smith, like Wilson, and like De Quincey, 
content to write articles. They aspired to write, and they did 
write, books ; and, that being so, they will all be treated in chap- 
ters other than the present, appropriated to the kinds in which 
their chief books were designed. 

The name of John Sterling is that of a man who, with no 
great literary claims of his own, managed to connect it durably 
and in a double fashion with literature, first as the subject of an 
immortal biography by Carlyle, secondly as the name-giver of the 
famous Sterling Club, which about 1838, and hardly numbering 
more members than the century did years, included a surpris- 
ing proportion of the most rising men of letters of the day, 
while all but a very few of its members were of literary mark. 
John Sterling himself was the son of a rather eccentric father, 
Edward Sterling, who, after trying soldiering with no great, and 
farming with decidedly ill, success, turned to journalism and 
succeeded brilliantly on the Times. His son was born in the Isle 
of Bute on 20th July 1806, was educated, first privately, then at 
Glasgow, and when about nineteen went to Trinity College, Cam- 
bridge, where he fell in with a famous and brilliant set. He 
migrated from Trinity College to Trinity Hall, took no degree, 
wrote a little for the then young Athenceum, was engaged in a 



206 THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERIODICALS chap. 

romantic and in all ways rather unfortunate business of encourag- 
ing a rebellion in Spain, but married instead of taking active part 
in it, and went to the West Indies. When he came home he, it is 
said under Coleridgean influence, took orders, but soon developed 
heterodox views and gave up active duty. He lived, though 
under sentence of death by consumption, till 1843, spending 
much time abroad, but writing a little, chiefly for periodicals. 

The chief characteristic of Sterling in life and thought appears 
to have been a vacillating impulsiveness, while in letters his pro- 
duction, small in bulk, is anything but strong in substance or 
form. But, like some other men who do not, in the common 
phrase, " do much," he seems to have been singularly effectual as 
a centre of literary friendship and following. The Sterling Club 
included not merely Tennyson, John Stuart Mill, Carlyle, Allan 
Cunningham, Lord Houghton, Sir Francis Palgrave, Bishop 
Thirlwall, who all receive separate notice elsewhere, but others 
who, being of less general fame, may best be noticed together 
here. There were the scholars Blakesley, Worsley, and Hepworth 
Thompson (afterwards Master of Trinity) ; H. N. Coleridge, the 
poet's nephew, son-in-law, and editor ; Sir Francis Doyle, after- 
wards Professor of Poetry at Oxford, the author of some interest- 
ing reminiscences in prose, and in verse of some of the best songs 
and poems on military subjects to-be found in the language, such 
as " The Loss of the Birkenhead," the " Private of the Buffs," 
and above all the noble and consummate " Red Thread of 
Honour"; Sir Edmund Head, Fellow of Merton and Governor- 
General of Canada, and a writer on art (not to be confounded 
with his namesake Sir Francis, the agreeable miscellanist, reviewer, 
and travel writer, who was also a baronet and also connected with 
Canada, where he was Governor of the Upper Province at the time 
of the Rebellion of 1835). There was Sir George Cornewall 
Lewis, a keen scholar and a fastidious writer, whose somewhat 
short life (1806-63) was chiefly occupied by politics; for he was 
a Poor-Law Commissioner, a Member of Parliament, and a holder 
of numerous offices up to those of Chancellor of the Exchequer 



iv THE STERLING CLUB 207 

and Secretary of State. Lewis, who edited the Edinburgh for a 
short time, wrote no very long work, but many on a great variety 
of subjects, the chief perhaps being On the Influence of Authority 
in Matters of Opinion, 1850 (a book interesting to contrast with 
one by a living statesman forty-five years later), the Inquiry into 
the Credibility of the Ancient Roman History (1855), and later 
treatises on The Government of Dependencies and the Best Form 
of Government. He was also an exact verbal scholar, was, despite 
the addiction to "dry" subjects which this list may seem to 
show, the author of not a fewfeux d' esprit, and was famous for his 
conversational sayings, the most hackneyed of which is probably 
" Life would be tolerable if it were not for its amusements." 

But even this did not exhaust the Sterling Club. There was 
another scholar, Maiden, who should have been mentioned with 
the group above ; the second Sir Frederick Pollock, who wrote 
too little but left an excellent translation of Dante, besides some 
reminiscences and other work ; Philip Pusey, elder brother of the 
theologian, and a man of remarkable ability ; James Spedding, 
who devoted almost the whole of his literary life to the study, 
championship, and editing of Bacon, but left other essays and 
reviews of great merit ; Twisleton, who undertook with singular 
patience and shrewdness the solution of literary and historical 
problems like the Junius question and that of the African martyrs ; 
and lastly George Stovin Venables, who for some five and thirty 
years was the main pillar in political writing of the Saturday 
Review, was a parliamentary lawyer of great diligence and suc- 
cess, and combined a singularly exact and wide knowledge of 
books and men in politics and literature with a keen judgment, 
an admirably forcible if somewhat mannered style, a disposition 
far more kindly than the world was apt to credit him with, and 
a famous power of conversation. All these men, almost without 
exception, were more or less contributors to periodicals; and it 
may certainly be said that, but for periodicals, it is rather unlikely 
that some of them would have contributed to literature at all. 

Not as a member of the Sterling Club, but as the intimate 



2o8 THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERIODICALS chap. 

friend of all its greatest members, as a contributor, though a 
rather unfrequent one, to papers, and as a writer of singular and 
extraordinary quality but difficult to class under a more precise 
head, may be noticed Edward FitzGerald, who, long a recluse, 
unstintedly admired by his friends but quite unknown to the 
public, became famous late in life by his translation of Omar 
Khayyam, and familiar somewhat after his death through the 
publication of his charming letters by Mr. Aldis Wright. He was 
born on 31st March 1809, near Woodbridge in Suffolk, the neigh- 
bourhood which was his headquarters for almost his entire life, 
till his death on a visit to a grandson of the poet Crabbe at 
Merton in Norfolk, 14th June 1883. He went to school at Bury, 
and thence to Cambridge, where he laid the foundation of his 
acquaintance with the famous Trinity set of 1825-30. But on 
taking his degree in the last named year and leaving college, he 
took to no profession, but entered on the life of reading, thinking, 
gardening, and boating, which he pursued for more than half a 
century. Besides his Trinity contemporaries, from Tennyson and 
Thackeray downwards, he had Carlyle for an intimate friend, and 
he married the daughter of Bernard Barton, the poet- Quaker 
and friend of Lamb. He published nothing till the second half of 
the century had opened, when Euphranor, written long before at 
Cambridge, or with reference to it, appeared. Then he learnt 
Spanish, and first showed his extraordinary faculty of translation by 
Englishing divers dramas of Calderon. Spanish gave way to Persian, 
and after some exercises elsewhere the famous version, paraphrase, 
or whatever it is to be called, of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam 
appeared in 1859, to be much altered in subsequent editions. 

FitzGerald's works in the collected edition of 1889 fill three 
pretty stout volumes, to which a considerable number of letters (he 
was first of all and almost solely a letter-writer and translator) 
have been added. In his prose (no disrespect being intended to 
Euphranor, a dialogue Berkeleian in form and of great beauty, 
and other things) he interests us doubly as a character and as a 
critic, for the letters contain much criticism. Personally Fitz- 



iv EDWARD FITZGERALD 209 

Gerald was a man of rather few and not obtrusive, but deep and 
warm sympathies, slow to make new friends but intensely tenacious 
of and affectionate towards the old, with a very strong distaste 
for crowds and general society, and undoubtedly somewhat of what 
the French call a maniaque, that is to say, a slightly hypochondriac 
crotcheteer. These characteristics, which make him interesting 
as a man, are still more interestingly reflected in his criticism, 
which is often one-sided and unjust, sometimes crotchety (as when 
he would not admit that even his beloved Alfred Tennyson had 
ever been at his best since the collection of 1842), but often also 
wonderfully delicate and true. 

As a translator he stands almost alone, his peculiar virtue, 
noticeable alike in his versions from the Spanish and Greek, being 
so capitally and once for all illustrated in that of Omar Khayyam 
that in narrow space it is not necessary to go beyond this. From 
the purist and pedantic point of view FitzGerald, no doubt, is 
wildly unfaithful. He scarcely ever renders word for word, and 
will insert, omit, alter, with perfect freedom ; yet the total effect is 
reproduced as perhaps no other translator has ever reproduced it. 
Whether his version of the Rubaiyat, with its sensuous fatalism, 
its ridicule of asceticism and renunciation, and its bewildering 
kaleidoscope of mysticism that becomes materialist and material- 
ism that becomes mystical, has not indirectly had influences, 
practical and literary, the results of which would have been more 
abhorrent to FitzGerald than to almost any one else, may be 
suggested. But the beauty of the poem as a poem is unmistak- 
able and altogether astounding. The melancholy richness of the 
rolling quatrain with its unicorn rhymes, the quaint mixture of 
farce and solemnity, passion and playfulness, the abundance of the 
imagery, the power of the thought, the seduction of the rhetoric, 
make the poem actually, though not original or English, one of 
the greatest of English poems. 

Of the periodical too, if not entirely, was Richard Harris 
Barham, " Thomas Ingoldsby," the author of the most popular 
book of light verse that ever issued from the press. His one 



THE DEVELOPMENT OF PERIODICALS 



novel, My Cousin Nicholas, was written for Blackwood ; the 
immortal Ingoldsby Legends appeared in Bentley and Colburn. 
Born at Canterbury in 17SS, of a family possessed of landed 
property, though not of much, and educated at St. Paul's School 
and Brasenose College, Barham took orders, and, working with 
thorough conscience as a clergyman, despite his light literature, 
became a minor canon in St. Paul's Cathedral. He died in 1845. 
Hardly any book is more widely known than the collected 
Ingoldsby Legends, which originally appeared in the last eight years 
of their author's life. Very recently they have met with a little 
priggish depreciation, the natural and indeed inevitable result, first 
of a certain change in speech and manners, and then of their long 
and vast popularity. Nor would any one contend that they are 
exactly great literature. But for inexhaustible fun that never gets 
flat and scarcely ever simply uproarious, for a facility and felicity 
in rhyme and rhythm which is almost miraculous, and for a 
blending of the grotesque and the terrible which, if \t%%finc than 
Praed's or Hood's, is only inferior to theirs — no one competent 
to judge and enjoy will ever go to Barham in vain. 

The same difficulty which beset us at the end of the last 
chapter recurs here, the difficulty arising from the existence of 
large numbers of persons of the third or lower ranks whose 
inclusion may be desired or their exclusion resented. At the head, 
or near it, of this class stand such figures as that of Douglas 
Terrold, a sort of very inferior Hook on the other side of politics, 
with a dash (also very inferior) of Hood, whose Mrs. Caudle's 
Curtain Lectures and similar things were very popular at and a 
little before the middle of the century, but whose permanent 
literary value is of the smallest, if indeed it can be said to exist. 
But of these — not a few of them more worthy if less prominent 
in their day than Jerrold — there could be no end ; and there 
would be little profit in trying to reach any. The successful " con- 
tributor," by the laws of the case, climbs on the shoulders of his 
less successful mates even more than elsewhere ; and the very im- 
petus which lands him on the height rejects them into the depths. 



CHAPTER V 

THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY 

After the brilliant group of historians whose work illustrated the 
close of the period covered by the preceding volume, it was 
some time before a historical writer of the first rank again appeared 
in England ; and there were reasons for this. Not that, as in the 
case of purely creative literature, in prose as in verse, there is 
any natural or actual lull between different successive periods in 
this case ; on the contrary the writing of history is more likely to 
be stimulated by example, and requires rather the utmost talent 
than positive genius, except in those rare cases which, as in other 
departments, are not to be accounted for, either in their presence or 
in their absence, by observation or inference. But in the first place 
the greatest minds of the first generation of which we have to take 
account, who were born about the beginning of the third quarter 
of the eighteenth century, were, partly by time and partly by 
chance, directed for the most part either into poetry, or into poli- 
tics, or into active life ; and the five and twenty years of the Rev- 
olutionary War in which they passed their manhood were more 
likely to provide materials for history, than history itself. 

Yet history, after the example given by Hume, by Robertson, 
and above all by Gibbon, was not at all likely to cease, nor did 
some men of great talents in other ways fail to betake themselves 
to it. Godwin was a historian, and, considering his strong preju- 
dices, the unkindness of fortune (for history demands leisure 
almost as much as poetry), and some defects of knowledge, not a 



THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY 



contemptible historian in his way. Mackintosh, intended for a 
philosopher, was a historian. Southey was a very considerable 
historian, and master of one of the most admirable historical styles 
on record. But he was signally unfortunate in having that work 
of his which should have been most popular, the History of the 
Peninsular War, pitted against another by a younger man of 
professional competence, of actual experience, and of brilliant 
literary powers, Sir William Napier (i 786-1860). The literary 
value of these two histories is more even than a generation which 
probably reads neither much and has almost forgotten Southey 
is apt to imagine ; and though there is no doubt that the Poet 
Laureate was strongly prejudiced on the Tory side, his compet- 
itor was even more partial and biassed against that side. But 
the difference between the two books is the difference between a 
task admirably performed, and performed to a certain extent 
con ainore, by a skilled practitioner in task-work, and the special 
effort of one who was at once an enthusiast and an expert in his 
subject. It is customary to call Napier's History of the Peninsu- 
lar War " the finest military history in the English language," 
and so, perhaps, it is. The famous description of the Battle of 
Albuera is only one of many showing eloquence without any mere 
fine writing, and with the knowledge of the soldier covering the 
artist's exaggeration. 

Moore, Campbell, Scott himself, were all, as has been pre- 
viously recorded in the notices of their proper work, historians by 
trade, though hardly, even to the extent to which Southey was, 
historians by craft. But an exception must be made for the exqui- 
site Tales of a Grandfather, in which Sir Walter, without perhaps 
a very strict application of historical criticism, applied his creative 
powers, refreshed in their decay by combined affection for the 
subject and for the presumed auditor, to fashioning the traditional 
history of old Scotland into one of the most delightful narratives 
of any language or time. But Henry Hallam, a contemporary 
of these men (1 778-1859), unlike them lives as a historian only, 
or as a historian and literary critic — occupations so frequently com- 



HALLAM 



213 



bined during the present century that perhaps an apology is due 
for the presentation of some writers under the general head of 
one class rather than under that of the other. Hallam, the son of 
a Dean of Bristol, educated at Eton and Christ Church, an early 
Edinburgh reviewer, and an honoured pundit and champion of 
the Whig party, possessing also great literary tastes, much industry, 
and considerable faculty both of judging and writing, united 
almost all the qualifications for a high reputation ; while his 
abstinence from public affairs, and from participation in the 
violent half-personal, half-political squabbles which were common 
among the literary men of his day, freed him from most of the 
disadvantages, while retaining for him all the advantages, of party 
connections. Early, too, he obtained a post in the Civil Service 
(a Commissionership of Audit), which gave him a comfortable sub- 
sistence while leaving him plenty of leisure. For thirty years, 
between 18 18 and 1848, he produced a series of books on political 
and literary history which at once attained a very high reputation, 
and can hardly be said to have yet lost it. These were a View 
of the State of Euivpe during the Middle Ages, published in the 
first, and supplemented by a volume of notes and corrections in 
the last, of the years just mentioned ; a Constitutional History of 
England from Henry VII. to George II. (1827); and an Intro- 
duction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, 
and Seventeenth Centuries (1837-39). 

The value of Hallam as a political and as a literary historian 
is by no means the same. In the former capacity he was perhaps 
too much influenced by that artificial and rather curious ideal of 
politics which distinguished the Whig party of the later eighteenth 
century, which was exaggerated, celebrated brilliantly, and perhaps 
buried by his pupil and younger contemporary, Macaulay, and 
which practically erects the result of a coincidence of accidents 
in English history into a permanent and rationally defensible 
form of government, comparable with and preferable to the earlier 
and unchanging forms of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy 
with their sub-varieties. A certain coldness and sluggishness of 



2i 4 THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY chap. 

temperament and sympathy also marred this part of Hallam's 
work, though less mischievously than elsewhere. But to balance 
these drawbacks handsomely in his favour, he possessed an 
industry which, immense as have been the pains spent on his 
subjects since he wrote, leaves him in possession of a very fair 
part of the field as a still trustworthy authority ; a mind, on the 
whole, judicial and fair ; and an excellently clear and scholarly if 
not exactly brilliant or engaging style. 

As a literary historian and critic Hallam deserves, except on 
the score of industry and width of reading, rather less praise ; 
and his dicta, once quoted with veneration even by good authori- 
ties, and borrowed, with or without acknowledgment, by nearly all 
second-hand writers, are being more and more neglected by both. 
Nor is this unjust, for Hallam, though possessed, as has been 
said, of sound and wide scholarship, and of a taste fairly trust- 
worthy in accepted and recognised matters, was too apt to be at 
a loss when confronted with an abnormal or eccentric literary per- 
sonality, shared far too much the hide-bound narrowness of the 
rules which guided his friend Jeffrey, lacked the enthusiasm 
which not seldom melted Jeffrey's chains of ice, and was con- 
stantly apt to intrude into the court of literary judgments, methods, 
procedures, and codes of law which have no business there. 

Many other estimable, and some excellent writers fill up the 
space of fifty years, which may be described best, both for remem- 
brance and for accuracy, as the space between Gibbon and 
Carlyle. William Roscoe, who was born as far back as 1753 and 
did not die till 1831, was the son of a market-gardener near 
Liverpool, and had few advantages of education, but became an 
attorney, attached himself strenuously to literature, especially 
Italian literature, and in 1796 published his Life of Lorenzo de 
Medici, which, after finishing it, he followed up nine years later 
with the Life of Leo the Tenth. Both obtained not merely an 
English but a continental reputation, both became in a manner 
classics, and both retain value to this day, though the Italian 
Renaissance has been a specially favourite subject of modern 



MITFORD — LINGARD 215 



inquiry. Roscoe was a violent Whig, and not a very dispassion- 
ate student in some respects ; but he wrote well, and he is an 
early example of the diffusion of the historic spirit proper, in 
which Gibbon had at once set the example and, with some lapses, 
attained nearly to perfection. 

William Mitford (1 744-1827) was even an older man than 
Roscoe, and belonged to a slightly less modern school of history- 
writing. He was a man of means, a friend of Gibbon, his fellow- 
officer in the militia, and like him a strong Tory, though unlike 
him he could not keep his politics out of his history. Although 
Mitford's hatred of democracy, whether well- or ill-founded, makes 
him sometimes unfair, and though his History of Greece contains 
some blunders, it is on the whole rather a pity that it should have 
been superseded to the extent to which it actually has been by 
those of Grote and Thirlvvall. For it is not more prejudiced and 
much better written than Grote's, while it has greater liveliness 
and zest than the Bishop's. It occupied more than thirty years 
in publication, the first volume appearing in 1784, the last in 
1818. 

While Roscoe and Mitford were thus dealing with foreign and 
ancient subjects, English history became the theme of a some- 
what younger pair of historians, one of whom, Sharon Turner, 
was born in 1768 and died in 1847 > while John Lingard, born 
three years later, outlived Turner by four. Lingard was a Roman 
Catholic priest, and after being educated at Douai, divided most 
of his time between pastoral work and teaching at the newly 
founded Roman Catholic school of Ushaw. He was the author 
of what still retains the credit of being the best history of Eng- 
land on the great scale, in point of the union of accuracy, skilful 
arrangement, fairness (despite his inevitable prepossessions), and 
competent literary form, — no mean credit for a member of an 
unpopular minority to have attained in a century of the most 
active historical investigation. Turner was more of a specialist 
and particularist, and his style is not very estimable. He wrote 
many books on English history, those on the later periods being 



216 THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY chap. 

of little value. But his History of the Anglo-Saxons, first issued 
in 1799, was based on thorough research, and may be said to 
have for the first time rescued the period of origins of English 
history from the discreditable condition of perfunctory, tradi- 
tional, and second- or third-hand treatment in which most, if not 
all, previous historians of England had been content to leave it. 

Sir Francis Palgravey another historian to whom the student 
of early English history is deeply indebted, was born in London 
in 17SS, his paternal name being Cohen. He took to the law, 
and early devoted himself both within and outside his profession 
to genealogical and antiquarian research. Before much attention 
had been paid in France itself to Old French, he published a col- 
lection of Anglo-Norman poems in 18 18, and from these studies 
he passed to that of English history as such. He was knighted 
in 1832, and made Deputy- Keeper of the Records in 1838; his 
tenure of this post being only terminated by his death in [861. 
Palgrave edited many State documents (writs, calendars, rolls, 
and so forth), and in his last years executed a History of Nor- 
mandy ami England oi~ great value. His considerable literary 
power became more considerable still in two of his sons: the 
eldest, for some time past Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Mr. F. T. 
Palgrave, being still alive, and therefore merely to be mentioned; 
while the second, William Gifford, who was born in 1826 and 
died in t8S8, Minister at Monte Video, was a man of the most 
brilliant talents and the most varied career. He was a soldier, a 
Jesuit, a traveller in the most forbidden parts of Arabia at the 
expense of a foreign country, and for nearly a quarter of a cen- 
tury a member of tin- consular and diplomatic service of his own. 
His Narrative of his Arabian journey, his Dutcli Guiana, and 
some remarkable poems are only a few of his works, all of which 
have strong character. 

Nearly contemporary with these was Dr. Thomas M'Crie (1772— 
1 835 ) , whose Lives of Knox (1812) and Melville (1S19) entitle him 
to something like the title of Historian of Scotch Presbyterianism 
in its militant period. M'Crie, who was styled by Hallam (a person 



MINOR HISTORIANS 217 



not given to nicknames), " the Protestant Hildebrand," was a 
worthy and learned man of untiring industry, and his subjects so 
intimately concern not merely Scottish but British history for 
nearly two centuries, that his handling of them could not but be 
important. But he was desperately prejudiced, and his furious 
attack on Sir Walter Scott's Old Mortality, by which he is 
perhaps known to more persons than by his own far from un- 
interesting works, argues a crass deficiency in intellectual and 
aesthetic comprehension. 

The tenth decade of the eighteenth century was as much a 
decade of historians as the eighth had been a decade of poets ; 
and with Milman and Tytler born in 1791, Alison in 1792, Grote 
in 1794, Arnold and Carlyle in 1795, Thirlwall in 1797, and 
Macaulay in 1800, it may probably challenge comparison with 
any period of equal length. The batch falls into three pretty 
distinct classes, and the individual members of it are also pretty 
widely separated in importance, so that it may be more convenient 
to discuss them in the inverse order of their merit rather than in 
the direct order of their births. 

Patrick Fraser Tytler, son and grandson of historians (his 
grandfather William being the first and not the worst champion 
of Queen Mary against the somewhat Philistine estimates of 
Hume and Robertson, and his father Alexander a Professor of 
History, a Scotch Judge, and an excellent writer in various kinds 
of belles lettres) , was a man of the finest character, the friend of 
most of the great men of letters at Edinburgh in the age of Scott 
and Jeffrey, and the author of an excellent History of Scotland 
from Alexander the Third to the Union of the Crowns. He was 
born in 1791, was called to the Scotch Bar in 1813, and died 
young for a historian (a class which has so much to do with Time 
that he is apt to be merciful to it) in 1849. He was perhaps hardly 
a man of genius, but he commanded universal respect. Sir Archi- 
bald Alison was the son of a clergyman of the same name, who, after 
taking orders in England and holding some benefices there, became 
known as the author of Essays on the Principles of Taste, which 



218 THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY CHAP. 

possess a good deal of formal and some real merit. Archibald the 
younger was highly distinguished at the University of Edinburgh, 
was called to the Scotch Bar, and distinguished himself there also, 
being ultimately appointed Sheriff of Lanarkshire. Like most of 
the brighter wits among his immediate contemporaries in Scot- 
land (we have the indisputable testimony of Jeffrey to the fact) 
Alison was an out-and-out Tory, and a constant contributor to 
Blackwood, while his literary activity took very numerous shapes. 
At last he began, and in the twenty years from 1839 to 1859 
carried through, a History of Europe during the French Revolution, 
completed by one of Europe from the Fall of the First to the 
Accession of the Third Napoleon. He died in 1867. It was 
rather unfortunate for Alison that he did not undertake this great 
work until the period of Liberal triumph which marked the 
middle decades of the century had well set in. It was still more 
unlucky, and it could less be set down to the operations of unkind 
chance, that in many of the qualifications of the writer in 
general, and the historical writer in particular, he was deficient. 
He had energy and industry; he was much less inaccurate than 
it was long the fashion to represent him ; a high sense of 
patriotism and the political virtues generally, a very fair faculty 
of judging evidence, and a thorough interest in his subject were 
his. But his book was most unfortunately diffuse, earning its 
author the sobriquet of " Mr. Wordy," and it was conspicuously 
lacking in grasp, both in the marshalling of events and in the 
depicting of characters. Critics, even when they sympathised, 
have never liked it ; but contrary to the wont of very lengthy 
histories, it found considerable favour with the public, who, as the 
French gibe has it, were not " hampered by the style," and 
who probably found in the popular explanation of a great series 
of important and interesting affairs all that they cared for. Nor 
is it unlikely that this popularity rather exaggerated the ill-will of the 
critics themselves. Alison is not quotable ; he is, even after youth, 
read with no small difficulty ; but it would be no bad thing if 
other periods of history had been treated in his manner and spirit. 



MILMAN 219 



Henry Hart Milman belongs to very much the same class of 
historian as Hallam, but unlike Hallam he was a poet, and, 
though a Broad Churchman of the days before the nickname was 
given, more of an adherent to the imaginative and traditional 
side of things. His father was a King's Physician, and he was 
educated at Eton and Brasenose. He obtained the Newdigate, 
and after bringing out his best play Fazio (of which more will be 
said later), took orders and received the vicarage of St. Mary's, 
Reading. Some poems of merit in the second class, including 
some hymns very nearly in the first, followed, and in 182 1 
he became Professor of Poetry at Oxford, where six years later 
he was Bampton Lecturer. It was in 1829 that Milman, who 
had been a frequent contributor to the Quarterly Review, began 
the series of his works on ecclesiastical history with the History 
of the Jews, the weakest of them (for Milman was not a very 
great Hebraist, and while endeavouring to avoid rigid orthodoxy 
did not satisfy the demands of the newer heterodox criticism) . 
The History of Christianity to the Abolition of Paganism was 
better (1840), and the History of Latin Christianity (1854) 
better still. This last indeed, based on an erudition which en- 
abled Milman to re-edit Gibbon with advantage, is a great book, 
and will probably live. For Milman here really knew; he had 
(like most poets who write prose with fair practice) an excellent 
style ; and he was able — as many men who have had knowledge 
have not been able, and as many who have had style have not 
tried or have failed to do — to rise to the height of a really great 
argument, and treat it with the grasp and ease which are the soul 
of history. That he owed much to Gibbon himself is certain ; 
that he did not fail to use his pupilage to that greatest of 
historians so as to rank among the best of his followers is not 
less certain, and is high enough praise for any man. He re- 
ceived the Deanery of St. Paul's in 1849, an d hdd it till his 
death in 1868, having worthily sustained the glory of this the 
most literary of all great preferments in the Church of England 
by tradition, and having earned among English ecclesiastical 



THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY 



historians a place like that of Napier among their military com- 
rades. 

Hallam and Milman were both, as has been said, Oxford men, 
and the unmistakable impress of that University was on both, 
though less on Hallam than on Milman. It is all the more 
interesting that their chief historical contemporaries of the same 
class were, the one a Cambridge man, and one of the most dis- 
tinguished, the other not a University man at all. Both Grote 
and Thirlwall, as it happens, were educated at the same public 
school, Charterhouse. George Grote, the elder of them, born in 
1794, was the son of a banker, and himself carried on that 
business for many years of his life. He was an extreme Liberal, 
or as it then began to be called, Radical, and a chief of the 
Philosophical Radicals of his time — persons who followed 
Bentham and the elder Mill. He was elected member for the 
City in the first Reform Parliament and held the seat for nine 
years ; though if he had not retired he would probably have been 
turned out. Leaving Parliament in 1841, he left business two 
years later, and gave himself up to his History of Greece, which 
was published in the ten years between 1846 and 1856. He 
died in 18 71, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. So was, 
four years later, his school-fellow, fellow-historian of Greece, and 
junior by three years, Connop Thirlwall. Thirlwall was one of 
the rare examples of extraordinary infant precocity (he could 
read Latin at three and Greek at four) who have been great 
scholars and men of distinction in after life, and to a ripe age. 
He was of a Northumbrian family, but was born at Stepney. 
From Charterhouse he went rather early (in 1814) to Trinity 
College, Cambridge, where he had almost the most brilliant 
undergraduate career on record, and duly gained his fellowship. 
He entered Lincoln's Inn, was actually called to the Bar, but 
preferred the Church, and took orders in his thirtieth year. 
He had already shown a strong leaning to theology, and had 
translated Schleiermacher. He now returned to Cambridge, 
taking both tutorial work and cure of souls; but in 1834 his 



GROTE — THIRLWALL 



Liberal views attracted the disfavour of Christopher Wordsworth, 
Master of Trinity, and Thirlwall, resigning his tutorship, was 
consoled by Brougham with a Yorkshire living. Nor was this 
long his only preferment, for the Whigs were not too well off for 
clergymen who united scholarship, character, and piety, and he 
was made Bishop of St. David's in 1840. He held the see for 
thirty-four years, working untiringly, earning justly (though his 
orthodoxy was of a somewhat Broad character, and he could 
reconcile his conscience to voting for the disestablishment of 
the Irish Church) the character of one of the most exemplary 
bishops of the century, and seldom dining without a cat on his 
shoulder. 

Thirlwall wrote many Charges, some of them famous, some 
delightful letters, part of a translation of Niebuhr, and some 
essays, while Grote, besides his historical work, produced some po- 
litical and other work before it, with a large but not very good 
book on Plato, and the beginning of another on Aristotle after it. 
But it is by their Histories of Greece that they must live in lit- 
erature. These histories (of which Grote 's was planned and be- 
gun as early as 1823, though not completed till long afterwards, 
while Thirlwall's began to appear in 1835, an d was finished just 
after Grote's saw the light) were both written with a certain 
general similarity of point of view as antidotes to Mitford, and as 
putting the Liberal view of the ever memorable and ever typical 
history of the Greek states. But in other respects they diverge 
widely ; and it has been a constant source of regret to scholars 
that the more popular, and as the French would say tapageur, 
of the two, to a considerable extent eclipsed the solid worth and 
the excellent form of Thirlwall. Grote's history displays immense 
painstaking and no inconsiderable scholarship, though it is very 
nearly as much a "party pamphlet" as Macaulay's own, the 
advocate's client being in this case not merely the Athenian 
democracy but even the Athenian demagogue. Yet it to a 
great extent redeems this by the vivid way in which it makes 
the subject alive, and turns Herodotus and Thucydides, 



THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY 



Demosthenes and Xenophon, from dead texts and school-books 
into theses of eager and stimulating interest. But it has 
absolutely no style ; its scale is much too great ; the endless 
discussions and arguments on quite minor points tend to throw 
the whole out of focus, and to disaccustom the student's eye 
and mind to impartial and judicial handling ; and the reader 
constantly sighs for the placid Olympian grasp of Gibbon, nay, 
even for the confident dogmatism of Macaulay himself, instead 
of the perpetual singlestick of argument which clatters and 
nourishes away to the utter discomposure of the dignity of the 
Historic Muse. 

It is possible, on the other hand, that Thirlwall may have 
sacrificed a little too much, considering his age and its demands, 
to mere dispassionate dignity. He is seldom picturesque, and 
indeed he never tries to be so. But to a scholarship naturally 
far superior to Grote's, he united a much fairer and more judicial 
mind, and the faculty of writing — instead of loose stuff not exactly 
ungrammatical nor always uncomely, but entirely devoid of any 
grace of style — an excellent kind of classical English, but slightly 
changed from the best eighteenth century models. And he had 
what Grote lacked, the gift of seeing that the historian need not 
— nay, that he ought not to — parade every detail of the argu- 
ments by which he has reached his conclusions ; but should 
state those conclusions themselves, reserving himself for occasional 
emergencies in which process as well as result may be properly 
exhibited. It is fair to say, in putting this curious pair forward 
as examples respectively of the popular and scholarly methods 
of historical writing, that Grote's learning and industry were very 
much more than popular, while Thirlwall's sense and style might 
with advantage have put on, now and then, a little more pomp 
and circumstance. But still the contrast holds ; and until fresh 
discoveries like that of the Athenian Polity accumulate to an 
extent which calls for and obtains a new real historian of Greece, 
it is Thirlwall and not Grote who deserves the first rank as such 
in English. 



THOMAS ARNOLD 223 



Intimately connected with all these historians in time and 
style, but having over them the temporary advantage of being 
famous in another way, and the, as some think, permanent dis- 
advantage of falling prematurely out of public favour, was Thomas 
Arnold. He was born at Cowes, in the Isle of Wight, on 13th 
June 1795, and was educated at Winchester and at Corpus 
Christi College, Oxford. At the age of twenty he was elected 
a fellow of Oriel — a distinction which was, and remained for two 
decades, almost the highest in the University — and he gained 
both Chancellor's Essay prizes, for Latin and English. Oriel was 
not in his time, as it was very shortly afterwards, a centre of 
ecclesiastical orthodoxy ; but rather the home of a curious 
transition blend of thought which in different persons took the 
high-and-dry or the Rationalist direction, and was only generally 
opposed to Evangelicalism. Arnold himself inclined to the 
Liberal side, and had also strong personal gifts for teaching. He 
took orders, but neither became a tutor nor took a living, and 
established himself at Laleham, on the Thames, to take private 
pupils. After ten years' practice here he was elected to the Head- 
mastership of Rugby, a school then, after vicissitudes, holding 
little if anything more than a medium place among those English 
Grammar Schools which ranked below the great schools of Eton, 
Harrow, Westminster, Winchester, and Charterhouse. How he 
succeeded in placing it on something like an equality with these, 
and how on the other hand he became, as it were, the apostle of 
the infant Broad Church School which held aloof alike from 
Evangelicals and Tractarians, are points which do not directly 
concern us. His more than indirect influence on literature was 
great ; for few schools have contributed to it, in the same time, 
a greater number of famous writers than Rugby did under his 
head-mastership. His direct connection with it was limited to 
a fair number of miscellaneous works, many sermons, an edition 
of Thucydides, and a History of Rome which did not proceed 
(owing to his death in 1842, just after he had been appointed 
Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford) beyond the 



224 THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY chap. 

Second Punic War. Arnold, once perhaps injudiciously ex- 
tolled by adoring pupils, and the defender of a theory of 
churchmanship which strains rather to the uttermost the prin- 
ciple of unorthodox economy, has rather sunk between the 
undying disapproval of the orthodox and the fact that the unor- 
thodox have long left his standpoint. But his style is undoubtedly 
of its own kind scholarly and excellent ; the matter of his history 
suffers from the common fault of taking Niebuhr at too high a 
valuation. 

Thomas Babington Macaulay (who may be conveniently dis- 
cussed before Carlyle, though he was Carlyle's junior by five years, 
inasmuch as, even putting relative critical estimate aside, he died 
much earlier and represented on the whole an older style of 
thought) was born at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire on 25 th 
October 1800. His father, Zachary Macaulay, though a very 
active agitator against the Slave Trade, was a strong Tory ; and 
the son's conversion to Whig opinions was effected at some not 
clearly ascertained period after he had reached manhood. A 
very precocious child, he was at first privately educated, but entered 
Trinity College, Cambridge, at the age of eighteen. Here he 
fell in with a set somewhat but not much less distinguished than 
that of the famous time, about ten years later, of which Tenny- 
son was the centre — a set the most brilliant member of which, 
besides Macaulay, was the poet Praed. Praed had been accus- 
tomed to journalism before he left Eton, and had made acquaint- 
ance at Windsor with the bookseller Knight, for whose Quarterly 
Magazine both he and Macaulay wrote some very good things. 
Macaulay himself obtained the Chancellor's prize for English 
poems on "Pompeii" and "Evening," in two successive years 
1819 and 1820; and after a very distinguished undergraduate 
career was elected fellow of his college. He went to the Bar, 
and his father's fortune, which had been a good one, being lost, 
his chances were for a time uncertain. In 1825, however, he won 
the admiration of Jeffrey and a place on the Edinburgh Review 
by his well-known, and slightly gaudy, but wonderfully fresh and 



MACAULAY 225 



stimulating article on Milton ; and literature, which had always 
been his ideal employment, seemed already likely to yield him a 
fair subsistence — for review-writing was at that time much more 
highly paid than it is at present. Moreover the Whigs, on the eve 
of their long postponed triumph, were looking out for young men 
of talent ; and Macaulay, being recruited by them, was put into 
Lord Lansdowne's pocket-borough of Calne. In the Reform 
debates themselves he distinguished himself greatly, and after the 
Bill was carried, having been elected for Leeds, he was not long 
in receiving his reward. It was munificent, for he, a man of little 
more than thirty, who had made no reputation at the Bar, though 
much elsewhere, was appointed Legal Member of Council in 
India with a salary very much of which could in those days be 
saved by a careful man, especially if, like Macaulay, he was un- 
married. Accordingly when, after between four and five years' 
stay, Macaulay in 1838 returned home, he was in possession of 
means sufficient to enable him to devote himself without fear or 
hindrance to literary and political pursuits, while his fame had 
been raised higher during his absence by his contributions to the 
Edinburgh Review. Indeed his Indian experiences furnished the 
information — erroneous in some cases and partisan in others, but 
brilliantly used — enabling him to write the famous essays on 
Clive and on Hastings, where his historical method is at almost its 
best. He was elected member for Edinburgh, a very high compli- 
ment, in 1839; and next year became Secretary for War. In 
1842 and 1843 respectively he established his position in verse 
and prose by publishing the Lays of Ancient Rome and a collec- 
tion of his Essays; and in 1846 he was made Postmaster-General. 
But his support of the Maynooth Grant offended the Protestantism 
of his constituents, and he lost his seat, and for the time his polit- 
ical opportunities, in 1847. The disaster was no disaster for liter- 
ature : he had long been employed on a History of England from 
the Accession of James II., and being now able to devote his whole 
time to it, he published the first volumes in 184S with astonishing 
success. 

Q 



226 THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY chap. 

He was re-elected for Edinburgh in 1852, published the third 
and fourth volumes of his History in 1855 with success greater 
in pecuniary ways and otherwise than even that of their fore- 
runners, was raised to the Upper House as Lord Macaulay of 
Rothley in 1857, and died two years later, on 28th December 
1859, of heart disease. Some personal peculiarities of Macaulay's 
— his extraordinary reading and memory, his brilliant but rather 
tyrannical conversation, his undoubting self-confidence — were 
pretty well known in his lifetime, and did not always create a 
prejudice in his favour. But a great revolution in this respect 
was brought about by the Life of him, produced a good many 
years later by his nephew, Sir George Trevelyan — a Life, standing 
for the interest of its matter and the skill and taste of its manner, 
not too far below the masterpieces of Boswell and Lockhart. 

The literary personality of Macaulay, though a great one in all 
respects, is neither complex nor unequally present, and it is there- 
fore desirable to discuss all its manifestations together. In the 
order of importance and of bulk his work may be divided into 
verse, prose-essays, and history, for his speeches less directly con- 
cern us, and are very little more than essays adroitly enough 
adjusted so as not to be tedious to the hearer. In all three 
capacities he was eminently popular; and in all three his popu- 
larity has brought with it a sort of reaction, partly justified, partly 
unjust. The worst brunt of this reaction has fallen upon his 
verse, the capital division of which, the Lays of Ancient Rome, was 
persistently decried by Mr. Matthew Arnold, the critic of most 
authority in the generation immediately succeeding Macaulay's. 
A poet of the very highest class Macaulay was not ; his way of 
thought was too positive, too clear, too destitute either of mystery 
or of dream, to command or to impart the true poetical mirage, to 
" make the common as if it were not common." His best efforts 
of this kind are in small and not very generally known things, the 
"Jacobite's Epitaph," "The Last Buccaneer." But his ballads 
earlier and later, Ivry, The Armada, Naseby, and the Roman 
quartet, exhibit the result of a consummate literary faculty with a 



MACAULAY 227 



real native gift for rhythm and metre, applying the lessons of the 
great Romantic generation with extraordinary vigour and success, 
and not without considerable eloquence and refinement. It is a 
gross and vulgar critical error to deem Macaulay's poetical effects 
vulgar or gross. They are popular ; they hit exactly that scheme 
of poetry which the general ear can appreciate and the general 
brain understand. They are coin for general circulation ; but they 
are not base coin. Hundreds and thousands of immature and 
'prentice tastes have been educated to the enjoyment of better 
tilings by them ; thousands and tens of thousands of tastes, re- 
spectable at least, have found in them the kind of poetry which 
they can like, and beyond which they are not fitted to go. And 
it would be a very great pity if there were ever wanting critical 
appreciations which, while relishing things more exquisite and 
understanding things more esoteric, can still taste and savour the 
simple genuine fare of poetry which Macaulay offers. There are 
few wiser proverbs than that which cautions us against demanding 
" better bread than is made of wheat," and the poetical bread of 
the Lays of Ancient Rome is an honest household loaf that no 
healthy palate will reject. 

In the second division, that of essay writing, Macaulay occupies 
a position both absolutely and relatively higher. That the best 
verse ranks above even the best prose is not easily disputable ; 
that prose which is among the very best of its own particular kind 
ranks above verse which though good is not the best, may be 
asserted without any fear. And in their own kind of essay, 
Macaulay's are quite supreme. Jeffrey, a master of writing and 
a still greater master of editing, with more than twenty years' 
practice in criticism, asked him " where he got that style? " The 
question was not entirely unanswerable. Macaulay had taken 
not a little from Gibbon ; he had taken something from a then 
still living contributor of Jeffrey's own, Hazlitt. But his private 
and personal note was after all uppermost in the compound. It 
had appeared early (it can be seen in things of his written when 
he was an undergraduate) . It owed much to the general atmo- 



228 THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY chap. 

sphere of the century, to the habit of drawing phrase, illustration, 
idea, not merely from the vernacular or from classical authorities, 
but from the great writers of earlier European literature. And 
it would probably have been impossible without the considerable 
body of forerunners which the Edinburgh, the Quarterly, and other 
things of which some notice has been given in a former chapter, 
had supplied. But still the individual character reigns supreme. 

Macaulay's Essays are in something more than the ordinary 
loose acceptation of the term a household word ; and it cannot 
be necessary to single out individual instances where almost all 
are famous, and where all deserve their fame. The " Milton " and 
the "Southey," the " Pitt" and the "Chatham," the "Addison " 
and the " Horace Walpole," the " Give " and the " Hastings," the 
" Frederick the Great " and the " Madame D'Arblay," the " Restor- 
ation Dramatists " and the " Boswell," the " Hallam " and the 
" Ranke," present with a marvellous consistency the same merits 
and the same defects. The defects are serious enough. In the first 
place the system, which Macaulay did not invent, but which he 
carried to perfection, of regarding the particular book in hand less 
as a subject of elaborate and minute criticism and exposition than 
as a mere starting-point from which to pursue the critic's own views 
of the subject, inevitably leads to unfairness, especially in matters 
of pure literature. Macaulay's most famous performance in this 
latter kind, the crushing review of the unlucky Robert Montgomery, 
though well enough deserved in the particular case, escapes this 
condemnation only to fall under another, that of looking at the 
parts rather than at the whole. It is quite certain that, given their 
plan, the two famous critiques of Tennyson and Keats, in the 
Quarterly and in Blackwood, are well enough justified. The critic 
looks only at the weak parts, and he judges the weak parts only 
by the stop-watch. But, on his own wide and more apparently 
generous method, Macaulay was exposed to equal dangers, and 
succumbed to them less excusably. He had strong prejudices, and 
it is impossible for any one who reads him with knowledge not 
to see that the vindication of those prejudices, rather than the 



MACAULAY 229 



exposition and valuation of the subject, was what he had first at 
heart. He was too well informed (though, especially in the Indian 
Essays, he was sometimes led astray by his authorities), and he 
was too honest a man, to be untrustworthy in positive statement. 
But though he practised little in the courts, he had the born ad- 
vocate's gift, or drawback, of inclination to suppressio veri and 
suggestio falsi, and he has a heavy account to make up under 
these heads. Even under them perhaps he has less to answer for 
than on the charge of a general superficiality and shallowness, which 
is all the more dangerous because of the apparently transparent 
thoroughness of his handling, and because of the actual clearness 
and force with which he both sees and puts his view. For a first 
draft of a subject Macaulay is incomparable, if his readers will 
only be content to take it for a first draft, and to feel that they 
must fill up and verify, that they must deepen and widen. But 
the heights and depths of the subject he never gives, and perhaps 
he never saw them. 

Part of this is no doubt to be set down to the quality of his 
style ; part to a weakness of his, which was not so much readiness 
to accept any conclusion that was convenient as a constitutional 
incapacity for not making up his mind. To leave a thing in half 
lights, in compromise, to take it, as the legal phrase of the country 
of his ancestors has it, ad avizandum, was to Macaulay abhorrent 
and impossible. He must "conclude," and he was rather too 
apt to do so by " quailing, crushing, and quelling " all difficulties 
of opposing arguments and qualifications. He simply would not 
have an unsolved problem mystery. Strafford was a " rancorous 
renegade " ; Swift a sort of gifted Judas ; Bacon a mean fellow 
with a great intellect; Dryden again a renegade, though not 
rancorous ; Marlborough a self-seeking traitor of genius. And all 
these conclusions were enforced in their own style — the style of 
rhomme mhne. It was rather teasingly antithetical, " Tom's 
snip-snap " as the jealous smartness of Brougham called it; it 
was somewhat mechanical in its arrangement of narrative, set 
passages of finer writing, cunningly devised summaries of facts, 



230 THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY chap. 

comparisons, contrasts (to show the writer's learning and dazzle 
the reader with names), exordium, iteration, peroration, and so 
forth. But it observed a very high standard of classical English, 
a little intolerant of neologism, but not stiff nor jejune. It had an 
almost unexampled — a certainly unsurpassed — power (slightly 
helped by repetition perhaps) of bringing the picture that the 
writer saw, the argument that he thought, the sentiment that he felt, 
before the reader's eyes, mind, and feeling. And, as indeed follows 
from this, it was pre-eminently clear. It is perhaps the clearest 
style in English that does not, like those of Swift and Cobbett, de- 
liberately or scornfully eschew rhetorical ornament. What Macau- 
lay means you never, being any degree short of an idiot, can fail 
to understand ; and yet he gives you the sense, equipped with a 
very considerable amount of preparation and trimming. It would 
not merely have been ungrateful, it would have been positively 
wrong, if his audience, specially trained as most of them were to 
his standpoint of Whig Reformer, had failed to hail him as one 
of the greatest writers that had ever been known. Nor would it 
be much less wrong if judges very differently equipped and con- 
stituted were to refuse him a high place among great writers. 

The characteristics of the Essays reproduce themselves on a 
magnified scale so exactly in the History that the foregoing 
criticism applies with absolute fidelity to the later and larger, as 
well as to the earlier and more minute work. But it would not 
be quite fair to say that no new merits appear. There are no new 
defects ; though the difference of the scope and character of the 
undertaking intensifies in degree, as well as magnifies in bulk, the 
faults of advocacy and of partiality which have caused the book to 
be dismissed, with a flippancy only too well deserved by its own 
treatment of opponents, as " a Whig pamphlet in four octavo vol- 
umes." Yet the width of study and the grasp of results, which, 
though remarkable, were not exactly extraordinary, in the compass 
and employed on the subject of ■A.Reveiw article, became altogether 
amazing and little short of miraculous in this enlarged field. One 
of the earliest and one of the best passages, the view of the state of 



MACAULAY 231 



England at the death of Charles the Second, may challenge com- 
parison, as a clearly arranged and perfectly mastered collection 
of innumerable minute facts sifted out of a thousand different 
sources, with anything in history ancient or modern. The scale of 
the book is undoubtedly too great ; and if it had been carried, 
as the author originally intended, to a date " within the memory 
of" his contemporaries, it would have required the life of Old 
Parr to complete it and the patience of Job to read it through. 
The necessity of a hero is a necessity felt by all the nobler sort 
of writers. But the choice of William of Orange for the purpose 
was, to say the least, unlucky ; and the low morality which he had 
himself, in an earlier work, confessed as to the statesmen of the 
period imparted an additional stimulus to the historian's natural 
tendency to be unfair to his political opponents, in the vain hope, 
by deepening the blacks, to get a sort of whiteness upon the 
grays. It has further to be confessed that independent exami- 
nation of separate points is not very favourable to Macaulay's 
trustworthiness. He never tells a falsehood ; but he not seldom 
contrives to convey one, and he constantly conceals the truth. 
Still, the general picture is so vivid and stimulating, the mastery of 
materials is so consummate, and the beauty of occasional passages 
— the story of Monmouth's Conspiracy, that of James' insane 
persecution of Magdalen College, that of the Trial of the Seven 
Bishops, that of the Siege of Londonderry — so seductive, that the 
most hostile criticism which is not prepared to shut eyes and ears 
to anything but faults cannot refuse admiration. And it ought 
not to be omitted that Macaulay was practically the first historian 
who not merely examined the literature of his subject with un- 
failing care and attention, but took the trouble to inspect the 
actual places with the zeal of a topographer or an antiquary. That 
this added greatly to the vividness and picturesque character of 
his descriptions need hardly be said ; that it often resulted in a 
distinct gain to historical knowledge is certain. But perhaps not 
its least merit was the putting down in a practically imperishable 
form, and in the clearest possible manner, of a vast number of 



232 THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY chap. 

interesting details which time is only too quick to sweep away. 
The face of England has changed more since Macaulay's time, 
though a bare generation since, than it had changed in the four 
or five generations between the day of his theme and his own ; 
and thus he rescued for us at once the present and the past. 

It is almost impossible to imagine a greater contrast between 
two contemporaries of the same nation, both men of letters of the 
first rank, than that which exists between Thomas Macaulay and 
Thomas Carlyle. In the subjects to which both had affinity there 
was a rather remarkable connection. Macaulay's education rather 
than his sympathies made him something of a master of at least 
the formal part of poetry, in which Carlyle could do nothing. But 
essentially they were both writers of prose ; they were both men 
in whom the historico-politico-social interests were much greater 
than the purely literary, the purely artistic, or the purely 
scientific — though just as Carlyle was a bad verse-writer or none 
at all, Macaulay a good one, so Carlyle was a good mathematician, 
Macaulay a bad one or none at all. But in the point of view 
from which they regarded the subjects with which they dealt, 
and in the style in which they treated them, they were poles 
asunder. Indeed it may be questioned whether " the style is the 
point of view" would not be a better form of the famous de- 
liverance than that which, in full or truncated form, has obtained 
currency. 

Carlyle was born on the 4th December 1795 at Ecclefechan 
(the Entepfuhl of the Sartor), in Dumfriesshire, being the son of 
a stone-mason. He was educated first at the parish school, then 
at that of Annan (the nearest town), and was about fifteen when 
he was sent, in the usual way of Scotch boys with some wits 
and no money, to the University of Edinburgh. His destination 
was equally of course the Church, but he very early developed 
that dislike to all fixed formularies which characterised him through 
life, and which perhaps was not his greatest characteristic. To 
mathematics, on the other hand, he took pretty kindly, though he 
seems to have early exhausted the fascinations of them. Like 



v CARLYLE 233 

most men of no means who have little fancy for any of the 
regular professions, he attempted teaching; and as a schoolmaster 
at Annan, Haddington, and Kirkcaldy, or a private tutor (his 
chief experience in which art was with Charles Buller), he spent 
no small number of years, doing also some hack-work in the way 
of translating, writing for Brewster's Encyclopedia, and contribut- 
ing to the London Magazine, that short-lived but fertile nurse of 
genius. The most remarkable of these productions was the 
Life of Schiller, which was published as a volume in 1S25, his 
thirtieth year, at which time he was a resident in London and 
a frequenter — a not too amiable one — of Coleridge's circle at 
Highgate and of other literary places. 

The most important event in his life took place in 1826, when 
he married Miss Jane Welsh, a young lady who traced her descent 
to John Knox, who had some property, who had a genius of her 
own, and who was all the more determined to marry a man of 
genius. She had hestitated between Irving and Carlyle, and, what- 
ever came of it, there can be no doubt that she was right in prefer- 
ring the somewhat uncouth and extremely undeveloped tutor who 
had taught her several things, — whether love in the proper 
sense was among them or not will always be a moot point. 
The Edinburgh Review was kind to Carlyle after its fashion, and 
he wrote for it ; but Jeffrey, though very well disposed both to 
Carlyle and to his wife, could not endure the changes which soon 
came on his style, and might have addressed the celebrated query 
which, as mentioned, just at the same time he addressed in 
delighted surprise to Macaulay, " Where did you get that style," 
to Carlyle in the identical words but with a very different mean- 
ing. Even had it been different, it was impossible that Carlyle 
should serve anywhere or any one ; and his mind, not an 
early ripening one, was even yet, at the age of thirty-two, in a 
very unorganised condition. He resolved to retire to his wife's 
farm of Craigenputtock in Nithsdale ; and Mrs. Carlyle had the 
almost unparalleled heroism to consent to this. For it must be 
remembered that her husband, with the exception of the revenue 



234 THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY chap. 

of a few essays, was living on her means, that he undertook no 
professional duties, and that in the farmhouse she had to perform 
those of a servant as well as those of a wife. Whatever other 
opinions may be passed on this episode of Carlyle's life, which 
lasted from 1828 to 1834, there can be no doubt that it "made " 
him. He did much positive work there, including all his best 
purely literary essays. There he wrote Sartor Resartus, his mani- 
festo and proclamation, a wild book which, to its eternal honour, 
Fraser's Magazine accepted, probably under the influence of Lock- 
hart, with whom, strangely different as they were, Carlyle was always 
on good, though never on intimate terms. There too was written 
great part of the earlier form of the French Revolution. But the 
greatest thing that he did at Craigenputtock was the thorough 
fermentation, clearing, and settling of himself. When he went 
there, at nearly thirty-three, it was more uncertain what would 
come of him than it is in the case of many a man when he leaves 
the University at three and twenty. When he left it, at close on 
his fortieth year, the drama of his literary life was complete, 
though only a few lines of it were written. 

That drama lasted in actual time for forty-seven years longer ; 
and for more than the first thirty of them fresh and ever fresh 
acts and scenes carried it on. For the public his place was taken 
once and for all by the History of the French Revolution, 
which, after alarming vicissitudes (John Stuart Mill having 
borrowed the first volume in MS. and lent it to a lady, to be 
destroyed by her housemaid), appeared in 1837. From at least 
that time Mrs. Carlyle's aspiration was fulfilled. There were gain- 
sayers of course, — it may almost be said that genius which is not 
gainsaid is not genius, — there were furious decriers of style, tem- 
per, and so forth. But nine out of every ten men at least whose 
opinion was worth taking knew that a new star of the first magni- 
tude had been added to English literature, however much they 
might think its rays in some respects baleful. 

Lecturing, after the example set chiefly by Coleridge and 
Hazlitt, was at this time a favourite resource for those men of 



v CARLYLE 235 

letters whose line of composition was not of the gainfulest; and 
Carlyle delivered several courses, some of which are unreported 
while others survive only in inadequate shapes. But Heroes and 
Hero- Worship was at first delivered orally, though it was not 
printed till 1841 ; and about the same time, or rather earlier, 
appeared the Miscellaneous Essays — a collection of his work at its 
freshest, least mannered, most varied, and in some respects best. 
Chartism (1839) and Past and Present (1843) reflected the 
political problems of the time and Carlyle's interest in them. But 
it was not till 1845 ^ at a second, in the ordinary sense, great work, 
Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, was published. Five years 
passed without anything substantive from him, but in 1850 ap- 
peared Latter-Day Pamphlets, the most brilliantly satiric, and in 
185 1 the softest, most finished, and (save theologically) least de- 
batable of all his books, the exquisite biography in miniature 
called the Life of Sterling. Then he engaged, it is difficult to 
say whether by ill-luck or not, on the last and largest of his 
great single undertakings, the History of Frederick the Great. 
Fourteen years were passed, as a matter of composition, in " the 
valley of the shadow of Frederick," as his wife put it-: half the 
time (from 1858 to 1865) saw the actual publication. Shortly 
after the completion of this, Carlyle visited Edinburgh to receive 
the Lord Rectorship of his University, and soon after his wife 
died. He survived her fifteen years, but did nothing more of 
great importance ; indeed, he was seventy-one when this loss 
happened. Some short things on "John Knox," on "The Early 
Kings of Norway," and a famous letter on " Shooting Niagara " 
(the Reform Bill of 1867), with a few more, appeared ; but he was 
chiefly occupied (as far as he was occupied at all) in writing 
reminiscences, and arranging memorials of Mrs. Carlyle. The 
publication of these books after his death by the late Mr. Froude 
led to a violent conflict of opinion both as to the propriety of the 
publication and as to the character of Carlyle himself. 

This conflict fortunately concerns us but little here. It is 
certain that Carlyle — springing from the lower ranks of society, 



236 THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY chap. 

educated excellently as far as the intellect was concerned, but 
without attention to such trifles as the habit (which his future wife 
early remarked in him) of putting bread and butter in his tea, a 
martyr from very early years to dyspepsia, fostering a retiring 
spirit and not too social temper, thoroughly convinced that the 
times were out of joint and not at all thoroughly convinced that 
he or any one could set them right, finally possessed of an in- 
tensely religious nature which by accident or waywardness had 
somehow thrown itself out of gear with religion — was not a happy 
man himself or likely to make any one else happy who lived with 
him. But it is certain also that both in respect to his wife and 
to those men, famous or not famous, of whom he has left too 
often unkindly record, his bark was much worse than his bite. 
And it is further certain that Mrs. Carlyle was no down-trodden 
drudge, but a woman of brains almost as alert as her husband's 
and a tongue almost as sharp as his, who had deliberately made 
her election of the vocation of being " wife to a man of genius," 
and who received what she had bargained for to the uttermost 
farthing. There will always be those who will think that Mr. 
Froude, doubtless with the best intentions, made a very great 
mistake ; that, at any rate for many years after Carlyle 's death, only 
a strictly genuine but judicious selection of the Reminiscences 
and Memorials should have been published, or else that the 
whole should have been worked into a real biography in which 
the frame and setting could have given the relief that the text 
required. But already, after more than the due voices, there is 
some peace on the subject; and a temporary wave of neglect, 
partly occasioned by this very controversy, was to be expected. 

That this wave will pass may be asserted with a fulness and 
calmness of assurance not to be surpassed in any similar case. 
Carlyle's influence during a great part of the second and the 
whole of the third quarter of this century was so enormous, his 
life was so prolonged, and the general tone of public thought and 
public policy which has prevailed since some time before his 
death has been so adverse to his temper, that the reaction which 



V CARLYLE 237 

is all but inevitable in all cases was certain to be severe in his. 
And if this were a history of thought instead of being a history 
of the verbal expression of thought, it would be possible and 
interesting to explain this reaction, and to forecast the certain 
rebound from it. As it is, however, we have to do with Carlyle as 
a man of letters only ; and if his position as the greatest English 
man of letters of the century in prose be disputed, it will gen- 
erally be found that the opposition is due to some not strictly 
literary cause, while it is certain that any competitor who is set 
up can be dislodged by a fervent and well-equipped Carlylian 
without very much difficulty. 

He has been classed here as a historian, and though the bulk 
of his work is very great and its apparent variety considerable, it 
will be found that history and her sister biography, even when his 
subjects bore an appearance of difference, always in reality en- 
gaged his attention. His three greatest books, containing more 
than half his work in bulk, — The French Revolution, the Cromwell, 
and the Frederick, — are all openly and avowedly historical. The 
Schiller and the Sterli?ig are biographies ; the Sartor Resartus 
a fantastic autobiography. Nearly all the Essays, even those 
which are most literary in subject — -all the Lectures on Heroes, the 
greater part of Past and Present, The Early Kings of Norway, 
the John Knox, are more or less plainly and strictly historical or 
biographical. Even Chartism, the non-antique part of Past and 
Present, and the Latter- Day Pamphlets, deal with politics in the 
sense in which politics are the principal agent in making history, 
regard them constantly and almost solely in their actual or 
probable effect on the life-story of the nation, and to no small 
extent of its individual members. Out of the historic relation of 
nation or individual Carlyle would very rarely attempt to place, 
and hardly ever succeeded in placing, any thing or person. He 
could not in the least judge literature — of which he was so great 
a practitioner always, and sometimes so great a judge — from the 
point of view of form : he would have scorned to do so, and did 
scorn those who did so. His deficiencies in abstract philosophy, 



238 THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY chap. 

whether political, theological, metaphysical, or other, arise directly 
from this — that he could never contemplate any of these things 
as abstract, but only in the common conduct of men towards 
their fellows, towards themselves, and towards God. For Carlyle 
never " forgot God," though he might speak unadvisedly with his 
lips of other men's ways of remembering Him. The " human 
document," as later slang has it, was in effect the only thing that 
interested him ; and he was content to employ it in constructing 
human history. More than once he put his idea of this history 
formally under a formal title. But his entire work is a much 
better exposition of that idea than these particular essays ; and it 
is not easy to open any page of it in which the idea itself is not 
vividly illustrated and enforced upon the reader. 

But once more, this is no place for even a summary, much less 
for a discussion, of the much discussed Carlylian " Gospel of 
Work " ; of its apostle's less vague, but also less disputable, con- 
demnations of shams and cants ; or of the innumerable applica- 
tions and uses to which he put these doctrines. The important 
thing for our purpose is that these applications took form in thirty 
volumes of the most brilliant, the most stimulating, the most I 
varied, the most original work in English literature. The titles 
of this work have been given ; to give here any notion of their 
contents would take the chapter. Carlyle could be — as in the 
Cromwell, where he sets himself and confines himself to the 
double task of elucidating his hero's rugged or crafty obscurities 
of speech and writing and of piecing them into a connected 
history, or where he wrestles with the huge accumulation of 
documents about Frederick — as practical as the driest of Dry-as- 
dusts. But others could equal, though few surpass him, in this. 
Where he stands alone is in a fantastic fertility of divagation and 
comment which is as much his own as the clear, neat directness of 
Macaulay is his. Much of it is due to his gospel, or temper, or 
whatever it is to be called, of earnest suasion to work and scornful 
denunciation of cant ; something to his wide reading and apt 
faculty of illustration ; but most to his style. 



v CARLYLE 239 

In the early days of his unpopularity this style used to be 
abused with heat or dismissed with scorn as mere falsetto, copied 
to a great extent from Richter. It is certain that in Carlyle's 
very earliest works there is small trace of it ; and that he writes in 
a fashion not very startlingly different from that of any well-read 
and well-taught author of his time. And it is certain also that it 
was after his special addiction to German studies that the new 
manner appeared. Yet it is very far indeed from being copied from 
any single model, or even from any single language ; and a great 
deal that is in it is not German at all. Something may even be traced 
to our own more fantastic writers in the seventeenth century, such 
as Sir Thomas Urquhart in Scotland and Sir Roger L' Estrange in 
England ; much to a Scottish fervour and quaintness blending 
itself with and utilising a wider range of reading than had been 
usual with Scotsmen ; most to the idiosyncrasy of the individual. 

Carlyle's style is not seldom spoken of as compact of tricks 
and manners ; and no doubt these are present in it. Yet a 
narrow inspection will show that its effect is by no means due so 
much in reality as in appearance to the retaining of capital letters, 
the violent breaches and aposiopeses, the omission of pronouns 
and colourless parts of speech generally, the coining of new 
words, and the introduction of unusual forms. These things are 
often there, but they are not always ; and even when they are, 
there is something else much more important, much more 
characteristic, but also much harder to put the finger on. There 
is in Carlyle's fiercer and more serious passages a fiery glow of 
enthusiasm or indignation, in his lighter ones a quaint felicity of 
unexpected humour, in his expositions a vividness of present- 
ment, in his arguments a sledge-hammer force, all of which are 
not to be found together anywhere else, and none of which is to 
be found anywhere in quite the same form. And despite the 
savagery, both of his indignation and his laughter, there is no 
greater master of tenderness. Wherever he is at home, and he 
seldom wanders far from it, the weapon of Carlyle is like none 
other, — it is the very sword of Goliath. 



2 4 o THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY chap. 

And this sword pierces to the joints and marrow as no other 
of the second division of our authors of the nineteenth century 
proper pierces, with the exception of that of Tennyson in verse. 
It is possible to disagree with Carlyle intensely ; perhaps it is not 
possible to agree with him in any detailed manner, unless the 
agreer be somewhat destitute of individual taste and judgment. 
But on his whole aspect and tendency, reserving individual ex- 
pressions, he is, as few are, great. The diathesis is there — the 
general disposition towards noble and high things. The ex- 
pression is there — the capacity of putting what is felt and meant 
in a manner always contemptuous of mediocrity, yet seldom 
disdainful of common sense. To speak on the best things 
in an original way, in a distinguished style, is the privilege of 
the elect in literature ; and none of those who were born within, 
or closely upon, the beginning of the century has had these gifts 
in English as have the authors of The Lotos Eaters and Sartor 
Resarius. 

Only one other writer of history during the century, himself 
the latest to die of his generation except Mr. Ruskin, deserves, 
for the union of historical and literary merit, to be placed, if not 
on a level with Macaulay and Carlyle, yet not far below them ; 
but a not inconsiderable number of historians and biographers of 
value who distinguished themselves about or since the middle of 
the century must be chronicled more or less briefly. Two Scottish 
scholars of eminence, both in turn Historiographers Royal of 
Scotland, John Hill Burton and William Forbes Skene, were 
born in the same year, 1809. Burton, who died in 1881, busied 
himself with the history of his country at large, beginning with 
the period since the Revolution, and tackling the earlier and 
more distinctively national time afterwards. He was not a very 
good writer, but displayed very great industry and learning with 
a sound and impartial judgment. Skene, on the other hand, 
was the greatest authority of his time (he lived till 1892) on 
" Celtic Scotland," which is the title of his principal book. In 
the same year (or in 1808) was born Charles Merivale, afterwards 



MERIVALE — KINGLAKE 241 



Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, and Dean of Ely, who, 
besides other work, established himself in the same class of 
historians with Hallam and Milman, Thirlwall and Grote, by his 
extensive History of the Romans under the Empire. On the 
whole, Merivale (who died in 1894) ranks, both for historical and 
literary gifts, somewhat below the other members of this remark- 
able group — a position which is still a very honourable one. 

Shortly after these three was born Alexander Kinglake (181 1- 
1891) — a man of very remarkable talents, but something of a 
" terrible example " in regard to the practice, which has already 
been noticed as characteristic of the century, of devoting enor- 
mously long histories to special subjects and points. Kinglake, 
who was a native of Somerset, an Eton and Cambridge man, a 
barrister subsequently, for some years a Member of Parliament, 
and a man of independent means, first distinguished himself in 
letters by the very brilliant and popular book of travels in the 
East called Eothen which was published in 1847. That there is 
something of manner and trick about this is not to be denied ; 
but it must be allowed that the trick and manner have been 
followed, apparently with success, in travel-writing for about half 
a century, while it cannot be fairly said that Kinglake himself 
had any exact models, though he may have owed something to 
Beckford and a little to Sterne. It is not very easy to say 
whether Kinglake's literary reputation would have stood higher or 
lower if he had written nothing else ; but as a matter of fact, 
before many years were over, he attempted a much more am- 
bitious task in the History of the Crimean War, the first two 
volumes of which appeared in 1863, though the book was not 
finished till twenty years later. That this history shows no small 
literary faculties no competent judge can deny. The art of word- 
painting — a dubious and dangerous art — is pushed to almost its 
furthest limits ; the writer has a wonderful gift of combining the 
minutest and most numerous details into an orderly and intelligible 
whole ; and the quality which the French untranslatably call d'able 
au corps, or, as we more pedantically say, " daemonic energy," is 

R 



242 THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY chap. 

present everywhere. But the book is monstrously out of pro- 
portion, — a single battle has something like an entire volume, and 
the events of some two years occupy eight, — and, clear as the 
individual pictures are, the panorama is of such endless length 
that the mind's eye retains no proper notion of it. In the second 
place, the style, though brilliant, is hard and brassy, full of points 
that are more suitable to the platform or the newspaper than to 
the historic page, — not so much polished as varnished, and after a 
short time intolerably fatiguing. In the third, — and this is the 
gravest fault of all, — the author's private or patriotic likes or dislikes 
pervade the whole performance and reduce too much of it to a 
tissue of extravagant advocacy or depreciation, made more dis- 
gusting by the repetition of catch phrases and pet labels somewhat 
after the manner of Dickens. Sir Stratford Canning, " the great 
Eltchi," is one of Kinglake's divinities, Lord Raglan another; 
and an acute and energetic, but not quite heaven-born diploma- 
tist, a most honest, modest, and in difficult circumstances stead- 
fast, if not always judicious soldier, become, the one Marlborough 
in the council-chamber, the other Marlborough in the field. On 
the other hand, for this or that reason, Mr. Kinglake had taken 
a violent dislike to the Emperor Napoleon the Third, and affected, 
as did some other English Liberals, to consider the coup d^etat 
as not merely a dubious piece of statecraft, but a hideous and 
abominable crime. Consequently, he abused all those who took 
part in it with tedious virulence, which has probably made not a 
few Englishmen look on them with much more leniency than 
they deserved. In short, Kinglake, with many of the qualities of 
the craftsman in an extraordinary degree, was almost entirely 
deficient in those of the artist. He served as a favourite example 
to Mr. Matthew Arnold of the deficiency of the British literary 
temper in accomplishment and grace, and it cannot be denied 
that Mr. Arnold's strictures were here justified to an extent which 
was not always the case when he assumed the office of censor. 

John Forster, who was born a year later than Kinglake, and 
died fifteen years before him, was an industrious writer of bio- 



FORSTER — BUCKLE 243 



graphies and biographical history, the friend of a good many 
men of letters, editor for many years of the Examiner, and secre- 
tary to the Lunacy Commissioners. He paid particular attention 
to the period of the Rebellion ; his Arrest of the Five Members 
being his chief work, among several devoted to it. He wrote a 
Life of Goldsmith, and began one of Swift. In contemporary 
biography his chief performances were lives of Landor and of 
Dickens, with both of whom he was extremely intimate. In 
private life Forster had the character of a bumptious busybody, 
which character indeed the two books just mentioned, even 
without the anecdotes abundant in more recent books of bio- 
graphy, abundantly establish. And towards the men of letters 
with whom he was intimate (Carlyle and Browning may be added 
to Landor and Dickens) he seems to have behaved like a Boswell- 
Podsnap, while in the latter half of the character he no doubt sat 
to Dickens himself. But he was an indefatigable literary inquirer, 
and seems, in a patronising kind of way, to have been liberal 
enough of the result of his inquiries. He had a real interest 
both in history and literature, and he wrote fairly enough. 

One of the most curious figures among the historians of this 
century was Henry Thomas Buckle, who was born near Black- 
heath in 1823, and privately educated. He had ample means, 
and was fond of books; and in 1857 he brought out the first 
volume (which was followed by a second in 1861) of a History of 
Civilisation. He did not nearly complete — in fact he only began 
— his scheme, in which the European part was ultimately in- 
tended to be subordinate to the English, and he died of typhus 
at Damascus in May 1862. The book attained at once, and for 
some time kept, an extraordinary popularity, which has been 
succeeded by a rather unjust depreciation. Both are to be 
accounted for by the fact that it is in many ways a book rather 
of the French than of the English type, and displays in fuller 
measure than almost any of Buckle's contemporaries in France 
itself, with the possible exception of Taine, could boast, the frank 
and fearless, some would say the headlong and headstrong, habit 



244 THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY chap. 

of generalisation — scorning particulars, or merely impressing into 
service such as are useful to it and drumming the others out — 
on which Frenchmen pride themselves, and for the lack of which 
they are apt to pronounce English historians, and indeed English 
men of letters of all kinds, plodding and unilluminated craftsmen 
rather than artists. In Buckle's reflections on Spain and Scotland, 
he accounts for the whole history of both countries and the whole 
character of both peoples by local conditions in the first place, 
and by forms of civil and ecclesiastical government. In respect 
to these last, his views were crude Voltairianism ; but perhaps this 
is the best and most characteristic example of his method. He 
was extremely prejudiced ; his lack of solid disciplinary education 
made him unapt to understand the true force and relative value 
of his facts and arguments ; and as his premises are for the most 
part capriciously selected facts cemented together with an un- 
tempered mortar of theory, his actual conclusions are rarely of 
much value. But his style is clear and vigorous ; the aggressive 
raiding character of his argument is agreeably stimulating, and 
excellent to make his readers clear up their minds on the other 
side ; while the dread of over-generalisation, however healthy in 
itself, has been so long a dominant force in English letters and 
philosophy that a little excess the other way might be decidedly 
useful as an alterative. The worst fault of Buckle was the 
Voltairianism above referred to, causing or caused by, as is 
always the case, a deplorable lack of taste, which is not con- 
fined to religious matters. 

Edward Augustus Freeman, who was a little younger than 
Buckle and survived him for thirty years, had some points in 
common with the historian of civilisation, though his education, 
interests, and tone in reference to religion were wholly different. 
Mr. Freeman, who was not at any public school but was a Fellow 
of Trinity College, Oxford, very soon devoted himself to the 
study of early English history, and secured a durable position by 
his elaborate History of the Norman Conquest (1867-76), which, 
even though the largest and most important, was only one among 



FREEMAN — GREEN 



245 



scores of works, ending in an unfinished History of Sicily. He 
was, when he died in 1892, Regius Professor of Modern History 
at Oxford, and he had for many years been very influential in 
determining the course of historical study. He was also, for 
many years of his life, an active journalist, being especially known 
as a contributor to the Saturday Review, and he sometimes took 
a very busy part in politics. Mr. Freeman was a student of un- 
tiring energy, and will always deserve honourable memory as the 
first historian who recognised and utilised the value of architecture 
in supplying historical documents and illustrations. His style was 
at times picturesque but too diffuse, and disfigured by a habit of 
allusion as teasing as Macaulay's antithesis or Kinglake's stock 
phrases. That he was apt to pronounce very strong opinions on 
almost any question with which he dealt, was perhaps a less draw- 
back to his excellence as a historian than the violently controver- 
sial tone in which he was wont to deal with those who happened 
to hold opinions different from his own. Putting defects of man- 
ner aside, there is no question that, for his own special period of 
English history (the eleventh and twelfth centuries), Mr. Free- 
man did more than any man had done before him, and as much 
as any man has done for any other period ; while in relation to 
his further subjects of study, his work, though less trustworthy, is 
full of stimulus and of information. 

His chief pupil John Richard Green, who was born in 1837 
and died of consumption in 1883, was a native of Oxford, and 
was educated there at Magdalen College School and Jesus 
College. Mr. Green, like Mr. Freeman, was a frequent contri- 
butor to the Saturday Review, and did some clerical duty in the 
east of London ; but he is best known by his historical work on 
English subjects, especially the famous Short History of the English 
People, perhaps the most popular work of its class and kind ever 
written. Mr. Green professed, on a principle which had been 
growing in favour for some time, to extend the usual conception 
of historical dealing to social, literary, and other matters. These, 
however, had never as a fact been overlooked by historians, and the 



246 THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY chap. 

popularity of the book was chiefly due to its judicious selection 
of interesting facts, to the spirit of the narrative, and to the style, 
based partly on Macaulay, but infused with a modernness which 
exactly hit the taste of the readers of our time. Mr. Green after- 
wards expanded this book somewhat ; and his early death cut 
short a series of more extended monographs, The Making of 
England, The Conquest of England, etc., which would have en- 
abled him to display the minute knowledge on which his more 
summary treatment of the general theme had been based. 

Among historians to whom in larger space more extended 
notice than is here possible would have to be given, perhaps the 
first place is due to Philip Henry, sixth Earl Stanhope (1805-75), 
who (chiefly under the title of Lord Mahon, which he bore before 
his succession to the earldom in 1855) was an active historical 
writer of great diligence and impartiality, and possessed of a fair 
though not very distinguished style. The first notable work, — 
a History of the War of the Succession in Spain (1832), — of Lord 
Stanhope (who was an Oxford man, took some part in politics, 
and was a devoted Peelite) was reviewed by Macaulay, and he 
wrote later several other and minor historical books. But his 
reputation rests on his History of Europe from the Peace of Utrecht 
to the Peace of Versailles, which occupied him for some twenty 
years, finishing in 1854. Very much less known to the general, 
but of singular ability, was William Johnson or Cory, who under 
the earlier name had attracted considerable public attention as 
an Eton master and as author of a small but remarkable volume 
of poems called Ionica. After his retirement from Eton and the 
change of his name, Mr. Cory amused himself with the compo- 
sition of a History of England, or rather a long essay thereon, 
which was very little read and falls completely out of the ordinary 
conception of such a book, but is distinguished by an exceptionally 
good and scholarly style, as well as by views and expressions of 
great originality. Many others must pass wholly unnoticed that 
we may finish this chapter with one capital name. 

One of the greatest historians of the century, except for 



FROUDE 



247 



one curious and unfortunate defect, and (without any drawback) 
one of the greatest writers of English prose during that century, 
was James Anthony Froude, who was born at Dartington near 
Totnes in 18 18, on 23rd April (Shakespeare's birthday and St. 
George's Day), and died in 1894 at the Molt near Salcombe in his 
native county. Mr. Froude (the youngest son of the Archdeacon 
of Totnes and the brother of Richard Hurrell Froude who played 
so remarkable a part in the Oxford Movement, and of William 
Froude the distinguished naval engineer) was a Westminster boy, 
and went to Oriel College, Oxford, afterwards obtaining a fellow- 
ship at Exeter. Like his elder brother he engaged in the Trac- 
tarian Movement, and was specially under the influence of 
Newman, taking orders in 1844. The great convulsion, how- 
ever, of Newman's secession sent him, not as it sent some with 
Newman, but like Mark Pattison and a few more, into scepticism 
if not exactly negation, on all religious matters. He put his 
change of opinions (he had previously written under the pseu- 
donym of "Zeta" a novel called Shadows of the Clouds) into 
a book entitled The Nemesis of Faith, published in 1849, resigned 
his fellowship, gave up or lost (to his great good fortune) a post 
which had been offered him in Tasmania, and betook himself to 
literature, being very much, except in point of style, under the 
influence of Carlyle. He wrote for Fraser, the Westminster, and 
other periodicals ; but was not content with fugitive compositions, 
and soon planned a History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to 
the Defeat of the Armada. The first volumes of this appeared in 
1856, and it was finished in 1869. Meanwhile Froude from time 
to time collected his essays into volumes called Short Studies, 
which contain some of his very best writing. His next large 
work was The English in Ireland, which was published in three 
volumes (1871-74). In 1874-75 Lord Carnarvon sent him on 
Government missions to the Cape, an importation of a French 
practice into England which was not very well justified by the 
particular instance. Between 1881 and 1884 he was occupied as 
Carlyle's literary executor in issuing his biographical remains. 



248 THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY chap. 

Later Oceana and The English in the West Indies contained at 
once sketches of travel and political reflections; and in 1889 he 
published an Irish historical romance, The Two Chiefs of Dunboy. 
He was made Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford in 
succession to Mr. Freeman, and his two latest works, Erasmus, 
published just before, and English Seame/i some months after his 
death, contain in part the results of the appointment. 

It is a vulgar observation that the natural element of some 
men appears to be hot water. No English author of the century 
justifies this better than Mr. Froude. His early change of faith 
attracted to him a very considerable share of the obloquy which 
usually (and perhaps not so unreasonably as is sometimes thought) 
attaches to violent revolutions of opinion on important points. 
His History was no sooner published than most acrimonious 
attacks were made upon it, and continued for many years, by a 
school of historical students with the late Mr. Freeman at their 
head. His Irish book, coinciding with the rise of" Home Rule " 
sentiment in Ireland, brought upon him furious enmity from the 
Irish Nationalist party and from those who, at first or by and by, 
sympathised with them in England. His colonial visits and 
criticisms not merely attracted to him the animosity of all those 
Englishmen who espoused the politics of non-intervention and 
non-aggrandisement, but aroused lively irritation in the Colonies 
themselves. About his discharge of his duties as Carlyle's execu- 
tor, a perfect tempest of indignation arose ; it being alleged that 
he had either carelessly, or through bad taste, or with deliberate 
treachery, revealed his dead friend's and master's weaknesses 
and domestic troubles to the public view. 

With some of the causes of this odium we are fortunately here 
dispensed from dealing. Theological and political matters, in so 
far as they are controversial, are altogether outside of our scope. 
The question of the dealing with Carlyle's "Remains" is one rather 
of ethics than of literature proper, and it is perhaps sufficient to 
make, in reference to it, the warning observation that Lockhart, 
who is now considered by almost all competent critics as a very 



V FROUDE 249 

pattern of the union of fidelity and good taste ^towards both his 
subject and his readers, was accused, at the appearance of his 
book, of treachery towards Scott. 

But it must be confessed that if Mr. Froude's critics were 
unfair (and they certainly were) he himself gave only too abundant 
opening to fair criticism. That his first great book (not perhaps 
any of his others) was planned on an unduly large scale, and 
indulged in far too extensive dissertation, divagation, and so 
forth, was rather the fault of his time than of himself. Grote and 
Macaulay had obtained, the first considerable, the latter immense 
popularity by similar prolixity ; and Carlyle was about, in the 
Frederick, to follow the fashion. But whereas all these three, 
according to the information open to them, were and are among 
the most painfully laborious researchers and, with a fair allowance, 
the most faithful recorders among historians, Mr. Froude dis- 
played an attention to accuracy which his warmest admirers must 
allow to be sadly, and which enemies asserted to be scandalously 
insufficient. He has been called by well-affected critics " con- 
genially inaccurate," and there is warrant for it. Nor did any 
one of his three great models come short of him in partiality, in 
advocacy, in the determination to make the reader accept his own 
view first of all. 

He was, in the earlier part of his career at any rate, a very 
poor man, whereas Macaulay was in easy, and Grote in affluent 
circumstances, and he had not Carlyle's Scotch thrift. But the 
carelessness of his dealing with documents had more in it than 
lack of pence to purchase assistance, or even than lack of 
dogged resolve to do the drudgery himself. His enemies of 
course asserted, or hinted, that the added cause was dishonesty 
at the worst, indifference to truth at the best. As far as dis- 
honesty goes they may be summarily non-suited. The present 
writer once detected, in a preface of Mr. Froude's to a book 
with which the introducer was thoroughly in sympathy, repeated 
errors of quotation or allusion which actually weakened Mr. 
Froude's own argument — cases where he made his own case 



250 THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY chap. 

worse by miscitation. To the very last, in his Erasmus itself, 
which he had prepared at some pains for the press, his work 
would always abound in the most astonishing slips of memory, 
oversights of fact, hastinesses of statement. There is probably 
no historian of anything like his calibre in the whole history 
of literature who is so dangerous to trust for mere matters of 
fact, who gives such bad books of reference, who is so little to 
be read with implicit confidence in detail. Had his critics 
confined themselves to pointing this out, and done him justice 
in his other and real merits, little fault could have been found 
with them. But it is impossible not to see that these merits 
were, at least in some cases, part of his crime, in the eyes of those 
who did not like him ; in others were of a kind which their 
natural abilities did not qualify them to detect. 

The first of these merits — the least it may be in some eyes, not 
so in others — was a steadfast, intense, fiery patriotism, which may 
remind us of that which Macaulay in a famous passage has 
ascribed to Chatham in modern times and to Demosthenes of 
old. This quality differed as much from the flowery and conven- 
tional rhetoric not uncommon in writers of some foreign nations, 
as from the smug self-satisfaction which was so frequent in 
English speakers and authors of his own earlier time. No one 
probably of Mr. Froude's day was less blind to English faults 
than he was ; no one more thoroughly grasped and more ardently 
admired the greatness of England, or more steadfastly did his 
utmost in his own vocation to keep her great. 

His second excellence — an excellence still contested and in a 
way contestable, but less subject than the first to personal and 
particular opinion — was his command of the historic grasp, his 
share of the historic sense. I have seen these terms referred to 
as if they were chatter or claptrap ; while the qualities which they 
denote are very often confounded with qualities which, sometimes 
found in connection with them, may exist without either. The 
historic sense may be roughly described as the power of seizing, 
and so of portraying, a historic character, incident, or period as if 



v FROUDE 251 

it were alive not dead ; in such a manner that the fit reader, 
whether he is convinced or not that the things ever did happen, 
sees that they might and probably must have happened. Some 
of the most estimable and excellent of historians have not had 
even a glimmering of this sense : they have at best laboriously 
assembled the materials out of which, sooner or later, some one 
with the sense will make a live history. But Thucydides and 
Herodotus had it; Tacitus had it, and even Sallust; it betrays 
itself in the most artless fashion in Villehardouin and Joinville, 
less artlessly in Confines ; Clarendon had it ; Gibbon had it ; 
Carlyle had it as none has had it before or since. And Mr. 
Froude had it ; not much less though more fitfully than Carlyle. 
It is not in the least necessary to agree with his views ; it is pos- 
sible to regard his facts with the most anxious suspicion. You 
may think that the case made out for King Henry is pretty weak, 
and the case made out against Queen Mary is much weaker. But 
Mr. Froude is among the rare Deucalions of historic literature : 
he cannot cast a stone but it becomes alive. 

Thirdly, and still rising in the scale of incontestability, though 
even so contested, I believe, by some, is the merit of style. I have 
sometimes doubted whether Mr. Froude at his best has any supe- 
rior among the prose writers of the last half of this century. His 
is not a catching style ; and in particular it does not perhaps 
impress itself upon green tastes. It has neither the popular and 
slightly brusque appeal of Macaulay or Kinglake, nor the unique 
magnificence of Mr. Ruskin, nor the fretted and iridescent deli- 
cacy of some other writers. It must be frankly confessed that, 
the bulk of his work being very great and his industry not be- 
ing untiring, it is unequal, and sometimes not above (it is never 
below) good journey-work. But at its best it is of a simply 
wonderful attraction — simply in the pure sense, for it is never 
very ornate, and does not proceed in point of "tricks" much 
beyond the best varieties of the latest Georgian form. That 
strange quality of " liveliness " which has been noticed in refer- 
ence to its author's view of history, animates it throughout. It is 



252 THE HISTORIANS OF THE CENTURY chap. V 

never flat ; never merely popular ; never merely scholarly ; never 
merely " precious " and eccentric. And at its very best it is ex- 
celled by no style in this century, and approached by few in 
this or any other, as a perfect harmony of unpretentious music, 
adjusted to the matter that it conveys, and lingering on the ear 
that it reaches. 

NOTE. — As examples of the almost enforced omissions referred to in the text 
may be mentioned earlier Archdeacon Coxe, the biographer of Marlborough and 
the historian of the House of Austria; later, Finlay (1799-1875), the valiant suc- 
cessor of Gibbon, and the chronicler of the obscure and thankless fortunes of the 
country called Greece, after it had ceased to be living. Professor Sir J. R. Seeley, 
Kingsley's successor at Cambridge (1834-94), equally distinguished m h' s profes- 
sional business, and as a lay theologian in a sense rather extra-orthodox than 
unorthodox; and Sir John Stirling-Maxwell, no mean historian either in the gen- 
eral sense or in the special department of Art. It is open to any one to contend 
that each and all of these as well deserve notice as not a few dealt with above ; yet 
if they were admitted others still could hardly be excluded. 



CHAPTER VI 



THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD 



The second period of English poetry in the nineteenth century 
displays a variety and abundance of poetical accomplishment 
which must rank it very little below either its immediate pre- 
decessor, or even the great so-called Elizabethan era. But it is 
distinguished from both these periods, and, indeed, from almost 
all others by the extraordinary predominance of a single poet in 
excellence, in influence, and in duration. There is probably no 
other instance anywhere of a poet who for more than sixty years 
wrote better poetry than any one of his contemporaries who 
were not very old men when he began, and for exactly fifty of 
those years was recognised by the best judges as the chief poet of 
his country if not of his time. 

Alfred Tennyson was born in 1809 at Somersby, in Lincoln- 
shire, where his father, a member of a good county family, was 
rector. He was the third son, and his two elder brothers, 
Frederick and Charles, both possessed considerable poetical 
gifts, though it cannot be said that the Poems by Tivo Brothers 
(it seems that it should really have been " three "), which appeared 
in 1826, display much of this or anything whatever of Alfred's 
subsequent charm. From the Grammar School of Louth the 
poet went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was contem- 
porary, and in most cases intimate, with an unusually distinguished 
set of undergraduates, many of whom afterwards figured in the 
famous Sterling Club (see chapter iv). He also did what not 

253 



254 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD chap. 

many great future poets have done, he obtained the Chancellor's 
prize for English verse with a poem on " Timbuctoo," where again 
his special note is almost, though perhaps not quite, absent : it 
appears faintly and fitfully in another juvenile poem not formally 
published till long afterwards, " The Lover's Tale." 

It was in 1830 that he made his first substantive appearance 
with a book of Poems. This volume was afterwards subjected 
to a severe handling by the poet in the way of revision and 
omission — processes which through life he continued with such 
perseverance and rigour, that the final critical edition of him, 
when it appears, will be one of the most complicated of the 
kind in English literature. So did he also with another which 
appeared two years (or a little more) later. It is not therefore 
quite just to judge the criticism which these books received, by 
the present condition of the poems which figured in them ; for 
though most of the beauties were there then, they were accom- 
panied by many defects which are not there now. Criticism, how- 
ever, was undoubtedly unfavourable, and even unfair. Although 
Tennyson was not, either at this time or at any other, a party 
politician, the two great Tory periodicals, the Quarterly Review 
and Blackwood's Magazine, were still animated, the former by a 
dislike to the Romantic school in poetry, the latter by a dislike 
to " Cockneys " — though how anybody could have discovered a 
Cockney in Tennyson may seem marvellous enough. Accordingly 
Lockhart in the one and Wilson in the other fell foul (though in 
Wilson's case, at least, not indiscriminately) of work which beyond 
all question offered very numerous and very convenient handles, 
in ways which will be mentioned presently, to merely carping 
criticism. Some attempts at reply were made by the poet's 
friends, notably A. H. Hallam, but the public did not take to 
him, and even well-affected and competent older judges, such 
as Coleridge, expressed very qualified admiration. 

But during the next decade, in which he gave himself up 
silently to the task of perfecting his art, attempting no profession 
or literary occupation of profit, and living (partly in London, partly 



TENNYSON 255 



in the country at High Beach and elsewhere) with extreme sim- 
plicity and economy on his own small means and a pension which 
was provided for him, the leaven of an almost fanatical admiration 
was spreading among readers of his own age or a little younger. 
And his next publication, a new issue of Poems in 1842 — contain- 
ing the final selection and revision of the others already mentioned, 
and a large reinforcement of admirable work — was received, not 
indeed with the popular avidity which had been displayed towards 
Scott and Byron in the generation before, and which revived in 
the case of his own later work, but with an immense enjoyment by 
almost all true lovers of poetry. Even Wordsworth, the most un- 
gracious critic of other men's work in his own art of whom the 
history of literature gives record, acknowledged Tennyson in the 
amplest terms. 

This was, as has been hinted above, exactly fifty years before 
his death, and though in the first of these five decades the pudding 
if not the praise was still rather scanty, his reputation waxed 
steadily and never waned. To keep for the present to chronicle 
in biography and bibliography, he published in 1847 tne exquisite 
"medley" of The Princess, his first attempt at a poem of any 
length. 1850 was a great year in his career, for in it he pub- 
lished the collection of elegiacs on his friend Arthur Hallam, in 
which some have seen his most perfect work, and he became 
Poet Laureate. Three years later he bought a house at Farring- 
ford, near Freshwater in the Isle of Wight, which was for 
the rest of his life his occasional and, until 1870 (when to avoid 
intrusion he built himself another at Aldworth near Haslemere), 
his main house. His poetry now was beginning to bring in some 
profit, the editions of it multiplying every year; and during 
the last thirty years of his life, if not more, he was probably at 
least as richly provided with mere gold as any poet has ever 
been. He was, however, never seduced into hasty writing ; and 
he never gave himself to any other occupation save poetry, while 
during his entire life he was a hater of what is commonly called 
society. In 1855 there appeared Maud, the reception of which 



256 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD chap. 

seemed at first something of a relapse in welcome, which was in 
its first form open to some criticism, and which he touched up to 
one of the finest as a whole, as it was in parts one of the most 
passionate and melodious of his works. But the Idylls of the 
King, the first and best instalment of which appeared in 185S, 
completely revived even his popular vogue, and made him indeed 
popular as no poet had been since Byron. It was said at the 
time that 17,000 copies of Enoch Arden, his next volume (1S64), 
were sold on the morning of publication. 

For the rest of his life his issues were pretty frequent, though the 
individual volumes were never large. A series of dramas beginning 
with Queen Mary in 1875, an d continuing through Harold, The 
Falcon, The Cup, the unlucky Promise of May, Becket, and The 
Foresters, though fine enough for any other man, could be better 
spared by his critical admirers than any other portion of his 
works. But the volumes of poems proper, which appeared 
between 1864 and his death, Lucretius, Tiresias, the successive 
instalments of the Idylls, Locksley Hall Sixty Years After, Demeter, 
The Death of (Enone, and perhaps above all the splendid Ballads 
of 1880, never failed to contain with matter necessarily of varying 
excellence things altogether incomparable — one of the last, the 
finest and fortunately also the most popular, being the famous 
" Crossing the Bar," which appeared in his penultimate, but last 
not posthumous, volume in 1889. He died at Aldworth in 
October 1892, and was buried with an unequalled solemnity in 
Westminster Abbey. 

In the case of no English poet is it more important and 
interesting than in the case of Tennyson, considering the 
excellence of his own work in the first place, and the altogether 
unparalleled extent of his influence in the second, to trace the 
nature and character of his poetical quality. Nor is this difficult, 
though strange to say it has not always been done. In his 
very earliest work, so soon as this quality appeared at all, it is to 
be discovered side by side with other things which are not native. 
Undoubtedly the tradition which, in the general filiation of 



TENNYSON 257 



English poetry, connects Tennyson with Keats, is not wholly 
wrong. In many of the weaker things, and not a few of the 
better, of the volumes of 1830 and 1832, there is to be seen both 
the wonderful music which Keats attained by a combination of 
the classical and romantic appeals — the appeals which in his own 
case are singly exhibited at their best in the " Grecian Urn " and 
in " La Belle Dame sans Merci," — and the sometimes faulty and 
illegitimate means which Keats took to produce this effect. But 
to any one who compares rationally (and it may be permitted to 
remark parenthetically, that nothing seems to be more misunder- 
stood than the comparative point of view) the difference between 
Keats and Tennyson will emerge at once. Both being great poets, 
there is the inexplicable in both ; while as Keats undoubtedly 
died before he had any chance of applying to his own powers and 
products the unequalled process of clarifying and self-criticism 
which went on with Tennyson in the ten years' silence between 
the second of the volumes just mentioned and his issue of 1842, 
it is impossible to say that Keats himself could not have done 
something similar. Nothing that he ever did is worse in point of 
" gush," of undisciplined fluency, of mistakes in point of taste and 
of other defects than the notorious piece about " the darling little 
room," on which the future Poet Laureate's critics were so justly 
severe ; while in the single point of passion it is very doubtful 
whether Tennyson ever approached the author of " La Belle Dame 
sans Merci." There was not perhaps much to choose between 
the two in their natural power of associating pictorial with musical 
expression ; while both had that gift of simple humanity, of plain 
honest healthy understanding of common things, the absence of 
which gives to Shelley — in some ways a greater poet than either 
of them — a certain unearthliness and unreality. 

But Tennyson had from the first a wider range of interest and 
capacity than Keats, and he had the enormous advantage of 
thorough and regular literary training. No poet ever improved 
his own work as Tennyson did ; nor has any, while never allowing 
his genius to be daunted by self-comparison with his predecessors, 
s 



258 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD chap. 

had such a faculty of availing himself of what they had done 
without copying, of seeing what they had not done and supplying 
the gap himself. And besides this he had the inexplicable, the 
incommunicable, the unique, the personal gift. In the very earliest 
things, in " Claribel," in "Mariana," in the "Recollections of the 
Arabian Nights," in the " Ode to Memory," in the " Dirge," in the 
" Dying Swan," in " Oriana," there is even to those who were born 
long after they were written, even to those who have for years 
sedulously compared them with almost all things before and with 
all things since, the unmistakable note of the new, of the new that 
never can be old. It is there in the rhythms, it is there in the 
phrase. The poet may take things that had previously existed — 
the Keatsian and Shelleian lyric, the Wordsworthian attitude to 
Nature, the Miltonic blank verse ; but inevitably, invariably, each 
under his hands becomes different, becomes individual and original. 
The result cannot be accounted for by mannerisms, from which 
at no time was Tennyson free, and after the thousands and ten 
thousands of imitations which have been seen since, it stands 
out untouched, unrivalled. 

In the next instalment this quality of intense poetical in- 
dividuality strengthened and deepened. As we read " The Two 
Voices," "CEnone," "The Palace of Art," "The Lotos Eaters," 
" A Dream of Fair Women," it becomes almost incomprehensible 
how any one who ever read them even in forms less perfect than 
those that we possess, should have mistaken their incomparable 
excellence. But the student of literary history knows better. 
He knows that nearly always the poet has to create his audience, 
that he sings before the dawn of the day in which he is to be 
sovereign. 

And then with the 1842 book came practically the completion 
of Tennyson in the sense of the indication of his powers. Edward 
FitzGerald, as is elsewhere noticed, thought, or at least said, that 
everything his friend had done after this was more or less a 
declension. This is a common and not an ignoble Fallacy of 
Companionship — the delusion of those who have hailed and 



TENNYSON 259 



accompanied a poet or a prophet in his early struggles. It is 
not even wholly a fallacy, inasmuch as, in the case of the class of 
poets to which Tennyson belongs, there does come a time when 
the rest of the products of their genius is so to speak applied : 
it ceases to reveal them in new aspects. They do not repeat 
themselves ; but they chiefly vary. Now came the magnificent 
" Morte D'Arthur " (the " Idylls of the King " in microcosm, with 
all their merits and none of their defects), "St. Simeon Stylites," 
"Ulysses," "Locksley Hall," "St. Agnes' Eve," and other exquisite 
things ; while to this period, as the subsequent arrangement 
shows, belong not a few, such as "Tithonus " and "The Voyage," 
which were not actually published till later,. and in which keen 
observers at the time of their publication detected as it were an 
older ring, a more genuine and unblended vintage. 

It is not improper therefore to break off here for a moment 
and to endeavour to state — leaving out the graces that can 
never be stated, and are more important than all the others — the 
points in which this new excellence of Tennyson differed from 
the excellences of his forerunners. One of them, not the least 
important, but the least truly original, because something 
distantly resembling it had been seen before in Keats and 
Shelley, is the combined application of pictorial and musical 
handling. Not, of course, that all poets had not endeavoured to 
depict their subjects vividly and to arrange the picture in a 
melodious frame of sound, not that the best of them had not 
also endeavoured to convey, if it were possible, the colours into 
the sense, the sense into the music. But partly as a result of 
the natural development and acquired practice of the language, 
partly for the very reason that the arts both of painting and 
music had themselves made independent progress, most of all, 
perhaps, because Tennyson was the first poet in English of the 
very greatest genius who dared not to attempt work on the great 
scale, but put into short pieces (admitting, of course, of infinite 
formal variety) what most of his forerunners would have spun 
into long poems — the result here is, as a rule, far in advance 



260 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD chap. 

of those forerunners in this respect, and as an exception on a 
level with the very best of their exceptions. With Shakespeare 
there is no comparison ; Shakespeare can send to every poet 
an "O of Giotto" in his own style to which that poet must 
bow. But of others only Spenser had hitherto drawn such 
pictures as those of the " Palace " and the " Dream," and Spenser 
had done them in far less terse fashion than Tennyson. Only 
Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Blake, perhaps Beddoes, and a few 
Elizabethans had poured into the veins of language the ineffable 
musical throb of a score of pieces from " Claribel " to " Break ! 
Break ! " and not one of them had done it in quite the same way. 
Only Milton, with Thomson as a far distant second, had impressed 
upon non-dramatic blank verse such a swell and surge as that of 
" CEnone." And about all these different kinds and others there 
clung and rang a peculiar dreamy slow music which was heard 
for the first time, and which has never been reproduced, — a 
music which in "The Lotos Eaters," impossible as it might have 
seemed, adds a new charm after the Faerie Queen, after the 
Castle of Indolence, after the Revolt of Islam to the Spenserian 
stanza, which makes the stately verses of the " Palace " and the 
"Dream" tremble and cry with melodious emotion, and which 
accomplishes the miracle of the poet's own dying swan in a 
hundred other poems all " flooded over with eddying song." 

But there is something more to be noted still. The poet had 
caught and was utilising the spirit of his time in two ways, one of 
them almost entirely new. That he constantly sang the subjective 
view of nature may be set down to the fact that he came after 
Wordsworth, though the fact that he sang it without the Words- 
worthian dryness and dulness must be set down to his own credit. 
But in that sense of the history of former times which is perhaps 
the chief glory of the nineteenth century in matters of thought 
he had been anticipated by no one. He might not have attained 
it without Scott and Byron, but his expression of it was hardly 
conditioned in the very slightest degree by the expression either 
of Byron or of Scott. They were not in strictness men of the 



TENNYSON 261 



nineteenth century ; he was, and he represented the very best 
features of his time in attending, from its point of view mainly, 
to the features of better times. 

But if FitzGerald's dictum were taken in the sense that Tenny- 
son's poetical career might, with advantage or with anything but 
the greatest possible loss, have been closed in 1842, then cer- 
tainly it would be something more than a crotchet. Nothing 
perhaps appeared subsequently (with unimportant exceptions such 
as the plays, and as the dialect pieces of which the " Northern 
Farmer " was the first and best) the possibility of which could 
not have been divined from the earlier work. The tree had 
blossomed ; it had almost, to keep up the metaphor, set ; but 
by far the greater part of the fruit was yet to ripen, and very 
much of it was to be of quality not inferior, of quantity far 
greater, than anything that had yet been given. 

The Princess and In Memoriam, the two first-fruits of this later 
crop, were certainly not the least important. Indeed they may 
be said to have shown for the first time that the poet was capa- 
ble of producing, in lighter and severer styles respectively, work 
not limited to short flights and exemplifying what (perhaps mis- 
takenly) is called " thought," as well as style and feeling, colour 
and music. The Princess is undoubtedly Tennyson's greatest 
effort, if not exactly in comedy, in a vein verging towards the 
comic — a side on which he was not so well equipped for 
offence or for defence as on the other. But it is a masterpiece. 
Exquisite as its author's verse always is, it was never more ex- 
quisite than here, whether in blank verse or in the (superadded) 
lyrics, while none of his deliberately arranged plays contains 
characters half so good as those of the Princess herself, of Lady 
Blanche and Lady Psyche, of Cyril, of the two Kings, and even 
of one or two others. And that unequalled dream- faculty of his, 
which has been more than once glanced at, enabled him to carry 
off whatever was fantastical in the conception with almost un- 
paralleled felicity. It may or may not be agreed that the ques- 
tion of the equality of the sexes is one of the distinguishing 



262 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD chap. 

questions of this century ; and some of those who would give 
it that position may or may not maintain, if they think it worth 
while, that it is treated here too lightly, while their opponents 
may wish that it had been treated more lightly still. But this 
very difference will point the unbiassed critic to the same con- 
clusion, that Tennyson has hit the golden mean ; while that, 
whatever he has hit or missed in subject, the verse of his essay 
is golden, no one who is competent will doubt. Such lyrics as 
"The splendour falls" and "Tears, idle tears," such blank verse 
as that of the closing passage, would raise to the topmost heights 
of poetry whatever subject it was spent upon. 

In Memoriam attacked two subjects in the main, — the one 
perennial, the other of the time, — just as The Princess had done. 
The perennial, which is often but another, if not an exclusive, 
word for the poetical, was in the first case aspirant and happy 
love, in the other mourning friendship. The ephemeral was, in 
the latter, the sort of half doubting religiosity which has occupied 
so much of the thought of our day. On this latter point, as on 
the other just mentioned and on most beside, the attitude of Ten- 
nyson was " Liberal-Conservatism " (if political slang may be gen- 
eralised), inclining always to the Conservative rather than to the 
Liberal side, but giving Liberalism a sufficient footing and hearing. 
Here again opinions may be divided ; and here again those who 
think that in poetry the mere fancies of the moment are nothing 
may be disposed to pay little attention to the particular fancies 
which have occupied the poet. But here again the manner, as 
always with real poets, carries off, dissolves, annihilates the spe- 
cial matter for poetical readers. Tennyson had here taken (not 
invented) a remarkable and -not frequently used stanza, the iam- 
bic dimeter quatrain with the rhymes not alternated, but arranged 
abba. It is probable that if a well-instructed critic had been 
asked beforehand what would be the effect of this employed 
with a certain monotone of temper and subject in a book of 
some three thousand lines or so, he would have shaken his 
head and hinted that the substantive would probably justify 



TENNYSON 263 



its adjective and the monotone become monotonous. And if he 
had been really a deacon in his craft he would have added : 
" But to a poet there is nothing impossible." The difficulty was 
no impossibility to Tennyson. He has not only, in the rather 
more than six score poems of this wonderful book, adjusted his 
medium to a wide range of subjects, all themselves adjusted to 
the general theme, but he has achieved that poetic miracle, the 
communication to the same metre and to no very different 
scheme of phrase of an infinite variety of interior movement. 
There is scarcely a bad line in In Memoriam ; there are few lines 
that do not contain a noble thought, a passionate sentiment, a 
beautiful picture ; but there is nothing greater about it than the 
way in which, side by side with the prevailing undertone of the 
stanza, the individual pieces vary the music and accompany it, so 
to speak, in duet with a particular melody. It must have been 
already obvious to good ears that no greater master of English 
harmonics — perhaps that none so great — had ever lived ; but In 
Memoj-iam set the fact finally and irrevocably on record. 

Maud was the third, and perhaps it may be said to have 
been, on a great scale, the last experiment in thus combining 
the temporal with the eternal. It was also probably the weak- 
est as a whole, though the poet had never done more poetical 
things than the passage beginning, " Cold and clear-cut face " ; 
than the prothalamium, never to have its due sequel, " I have 
led her home " ; than the incomparable and never-to-be-hack- 
neyed "Come into the garden"; or than the best of all, "Oh ! 
that 'twere possible." It may even be contended that if it 
were ever allowable to put the finger down and say, " Here is 
the highest," these, and not the best things of the 1842 volumes, 
are the absolute summit of the poet's effort, the point which, 
though he was often near it, he never again quite reached. But 
the piece, as a whole, is certainly less of a success, less smooth 
and finished as it comes from its own lathe, than either The 
Princess or In Memoriam. It looks too like an essay in compe- 
tition with the " Spasmodic School " of its own day ; it drags in 



264 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD chap. 

merely casual things — adulteration, popular politics, and ephemera 
of all kinds — too assiduously, and its characterisations are not 
happy. There is a tradition that the poet met a critic, and a 
very accomplished critic too, who was one of his own oldest 
friends, and said, "What do you mean by calling Maud vulgar?" 
" I didn't," said the critic, quite truly. " No, but you meant it," 
growled Tennyson. And there was something of a confession in 
the growl. 

But these slight relapses (and, after all, what sort of a relapse 
is it which gives us not merely the incomparable things referred 
to, but others hardly less exquisite ?) never, in the great writers, 
serve as anything but retreats before an advance ; and certainly, 
in a sense, the Idylls of the King were an advance, though not, 
perhaps, in all senses. No total so brilliant, so varied within a 
certain general unity, so perfectly polished in style, so cunningly 
adjusted to meet the popular without disappointing the critical 
ear, had ever come from Tennyson's pen as the first quartet of 
Idylls, Enid, Vivien, Elaine, and Guinevere. No such book of 
English blank verse, with the doubtful exception of the Seasons, had 
been seen since Milton. Nothing more adroitly selected than 
the contrast of the four special pieces — a contrast lost to those 
who only read them in the completed Arthuriad — has been often 
attempted or ever achieved. It is true that the inner faithful, the 
sacred band of Tennysonians, old and young, grumbled a little 
that polish had been almost too much attended to ; that there 
was a certain hardish mannerism, glittering but cold, about the 
style ; that there was noticeable a certain compromise in the 
appeal, a certain trimming of the sail to the popular breeze. 
These criticisms were not entirely without foundation, and they 
were more justified than their authors could know by the later 
instalments of the poem, which, the latest not published till 
twenty-seven years afterwards, rounded it off to its present bulk 
of twelve books, fifteen separate pieces, and over ten thousand 
lines. Another, more pedantic in appearance, but not entirely 
destitute of weight, was that which urged that in handling the 



TENNYSON 265 



Arthurian story the author had, so to speak, " bastardised it," 
and had given neither mediaeval nor modern sentiment or colour- 
ing, but a sort of amalgamation of both. Yet the charm of the 
thing was so great, and the separate passages were so consum- 
mate, that even critics were loth to quarrel with such a gift. 

The later instalments of the poem — some of them, as has 
been said, very much later, but still so closely connected as 
to be best noticed here — were of somewhat less even excellence. 
It was an inevitable, but certainly an unfortunate thing, that the 
poet republished the magnificent early fragment above noticed in 
a setting which, fine as it would have been for any one else, 
was inferior to this work of the very best time. Some of the 
lighter passages, as in Gareth and Lynette, showed less grace 
than their forerunners in The Princess ; and in Pelleas and Ettarre 
and Balin and Balan the poet sometimes seemed to be attempt- 
ing alien moods which younger poets than himself had made 
their own. But the best passages of some of these later Idylls, 
notably those of The Holy Grail and The Last Tournament, were 
among the finest, not merely of the book, but of the poet. No- 
where has he caught the real, the best, spirit of the legends he 
followed more happily ; nowhere has he written more magnificent 
verse than in Percivale's account of his constantly baffled quest 
and of Lancelot's visit to the " enchanted towers of Carbonek." 

Far earlier than these, Enoch Arden and its companion poems 
were something more of a return to the scheme of the earlier books 
— no very long single composition, but a medley of blank verse 
pieces and lyrics, the former partly expansions of the scheme of 
the earlier " English Idyll," the latter various and generally 
beautiful ; one or two, such as " In the Valley of Cauterets," of 
the most beautiful. Here, too, were some interesting translations, 
with the dialect pieces above referred to ; and all the later volumes, 
except those containing the plays, preserved this mixed manner. 
Their contents are too numerous for many to be mentioned here. 
Only in the Ballads and Other Poems was something like a dis- 
tinctly new note struck in the two splendid patriotic pieces on 



266 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD chap. 

" The Last Fight of the Revenge" and the "Defence of Lucknow," 
which, even more than the poet's earlier " Charge of the Light 
Brigade," deserve the title of the best English war-songs since 
Campbell ; in " Rizpah," an idyll of a sterner and more tragic 
kind than anything he had previously attempted ; and in the 
"Voyage of Maeldune," this last in some respects the most 
interesting of the whole. For the marvellous power which great 
poets possess of melting, of " founding," so to speak, minor styles 
and kinds of poetry to their own image, while not losing a certain 
character of the original, has never been shown better than here. 
Attention had, even before the date of this poem, been drawn to 
the peculiar character of early Celtic poetry, — not the adulterated 
style of Ossian, but the genuine method of the old Irish singers. 
And, since, a whole band of young and very clever writers have 
set themselves, with a mixture of political and poetical enthusiasm, 
the task of reviving these notes if possible. They have rarely 
succeeded in getting very close to them without mere archaic 
pastiche. Tennyson in this poem carried away the whole genius 
of the Celtic legend, infused it into his own verse, branded it 
with his own seal, and yet left the character of the vintage as 
unmistakable as if he had been an Irishman of the tenth century, 
instead of an Englishman of the nineteenth. And indeed there 
are no times, or countries, or languages in the kingdom of poetry. 
A very little more may, perhaps, still be said about this great 
poet, — great in the character and variety of his accomplishment, in 
the volume of it, and, above all, in the extraordinarily sustained 
quality of his genius and the length of time during which it 
dominated and pervaded the literature of his country. The 
influences of Pope and Dryden were weak in force and merely 
external in effect, the influence of Byron was short-lived, that of 
Wordsworth was partial and limited, in comparison with the 
influence of Tennyson. Of this, as of a mere historical fact, 
there can be no dispute among those who care to inform them- 
selves of the facts and to consider them coolly. Of his intrinsic 
merit, as opposed to his influential importance, it is not of course 



TENNYSON 267 



possible to speak so peremptorily. Among the great volume of 
more or less unfavourable criticism which such a career was sure 
to call forth, two notes perhaps were the most dominant, the 
most constant, and (even fervent admirers may admit) the least 
unjust. He was accused of a somewhat excessive prettiness, a 
sort of dandyism and coquetry in form, and of a certain want of 
profundity in matter. The last charge is the more unprofitable 
in discussion, for it turns mainly on vast and vague questions of 
previous definition. " What is thought? " " What is profundity? " 
a by no means jesting demurrer may object, and he will not soon 
be cleared out of the way. And it will perhaps seem to some 
that what is called Tennyson's lack of profundity consists only in 
a disinclination on his part to indulge in what the Germans call 
the Schwatzerei, the endless, aimless talkee-talkee about " thought- 
ful " things in which the nineteenth century has indulged beyond the 
record of any since what used to be called the Dark Ages. On 
the real "great questions" Tennyson was not loth to speak, and 
spoke gravely enough ; even to the ephemeralities, as we have said, 
he paid rather too much than too little attention. But he did not 
go into the ins and outs of them as some of his contemporaries 
did, and as other contemporaries thought fitting. He usually 
neglected the negligible ; and perhaps it would not hurt him with 
posterity if he had neglected it a little more, though it hurt him a 
little with contemporaries that he neglected it as much as he did. 
The charge of prettiness is to be less completely ruled out ; 
though it shows even greater mistake in those who do more than 
touch very lightly on it. In the earliest forms of the earlier 
poems not seldom, and occasionally in even the latest forms of 
the later, the exquisiteness of the poet's touch in music and in 
painting, in fancy and in form, did sometimes pass into something 
like finicalness, into what is called in another language mignardise. 
But this was only the necessary, and, after he was out of his 
apprenticeship, the minimised effect of his great poetical quality 
— that very quality of exquisiteness in form, in fancy, in paint- 
ing, and in music which has just been stated. We have, it must 



268 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD CHAP. 

be admitted, had greater poets than Tennyson. Shakespeare, 
Spenser, Milton, Shelley, undoubtedly deserve this preference to 
him ; Wordsworth and Keats may deserve it. But we have had 
none so uniformly, and over such a large mass of work, exquisite. 
In the lighter fantastic veins he may sometimes be a little unsure 
in touch and taste; in satire and argument a little heavy, a 
little empty, a little rhetorical ; in domestic and ethical subjects 
a little tame. But his handlings of these things form a very 
small part of his work. And in the rest none of all these faults 
appears, and their absence is due to the fact that nothing inter- 
feres with the exquisite perfection of the form. Some faults have 
been found with Tennyson's rhymes, though this is generally 
hypercriticism ; and in his later years he was a little too apt to 
accumulate tribrachs in his blank verse, a result of a mistaken 
sense of the true fact that he was better at slow rhythms than at 
quick, and of an attempt to cheat nature. But in all other 
respects his versification is by far the most perfect of any English 
poet, and results in a harmony positively incomparable. So also 
his colour and outline in conveying the visual image are based on 
a study of natural fact and a practice in transferring it to words 
which are equally beyond comparison. Take any one of a myriad 
of lines of Tennyson, and the mere arrangement of vowels and 
consonants will be a delight to the ear ; let any one of a thousand 
of his descriptions body itself before the eye, and the picture will 
be like the things seen in a dream, but firmer and clearer. 

Although, as has been said, the popularity of Lord Tennyson 
itself was not a plant of very rapid growth, and though but a 
short time before his position was undisputed it was admitted 
only by a minority, imposing in quality but far from strong in 
mere numbers, his chief rival during the latter part of their 
joint lives was vastly slower in gaining the public ear. It is not 
quite pleasant to think that the well-merited but comparatively 
accidental distinction of the Laureateship perhaps did more even 
for Tennyson in this respect than the intrinsic value of his work. 
Robert Browning had no such aid, his verse was even more 



vi ROBERT BROWNING 269 

abhorrent than Tennyson's to the tradition of the elders, and 
until he found a sort of back-way to please, he was even more 
indifferent to pleasing. So that while Tennyson became in a 
manner popular soon after 1S50, two decades more had to pass 
before anything that could be called popularity came to Browning. 
It is, though the actual dates are well enough known to most 
people, still something of a surprise to remember that at that time 
he had been writing for very nearly forty years, and that his first 
book, though a little later than Tennyson's, actually appeared 
before the death of Coleridge and not more than a few months 
after that of Scott. Browning, about whose ancestry and parent- 
age a good deal of mostly superfluous ink has been shed, was 
born, the son of a city man, on 7th May 181 2, in the, according to 
the elder Mr. Weller, exceptional district of Camberwell. He was 
himself exceptional enough in more ways than one. His parents 
had means ; but Browning did not receive the ordinary education 
of a well-to-do Englishman at school and college, and his learning, 
though sufficiently various, was privately obtained. Pauline, his 
first poem, appeared in 1833, but had been written about two 
years earlier. He did not reprint it in the first general collection 
of his verse, nor till after his popularity had been established ; and 
it cannot be said to be of great intrinsic excellence. But it was 
distinctly characteristic : — first, in a strongly dramatic tone and 
strain without regular dramatic form ; secondly, in a peculiar 
fluency of decasyllabic verse that could not be directly traced to 
any model ; and, thirdly, in a certain quality of thought, which in 
later days for a long time received, and never entirely lost from 
the vulgar, the name of "obscurity," but which perhaps might be 
more justly termed breathlessness — the expression, if not the 
conception, of a man who either did not stop at all to pick his 
words, or was only careful to pick them out of the first choice that 
presented itself to him of something not commonplace. 

In Pauline, however, there is little positive beauty. In the next 
book, Paracelsus (1835 ) , there is a great deal. Here the dramatic 
form was much more definite, though still not attempting acted or 



270 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD Chap. 

actable drama. The poet's appetite for '•' soul-dissection " was 
amply shown in the characters not merely of Paracelsus himself, 
but of his soberer friends Festus and Michal, and of the Italian 
poet Aprile, a sort of Euphorion pretty evidently suggested by, 
though greatly enlarged from, the actual Euphorion of the second 
part of Faust, then not long finished. The rapid, breathless blank 
verse, the crowding rush of simile and illustration, and the positive 
plethora of meaning, more often glanced and hinted at than fully 
worked out, were as noteworthy as before in kind, and as much 
more so in degree as in scale. Here too were lyrics, not antici- 
pating the full splendour of the poet's later lyrical verse, but again 
quite original. Here, in fact, to anybody who chose to pay atten- 
tion, was a real " new poet " pretty plainly announced. 

Very few did choose to pay attention ; and Browning's next 
attempt was not of a kind to conciliate halting or hostile opinion, 
though it might please the initiated. He wrote for his friend Mac- 
ready a play intended at least to be of the regular acting kind. 
This play, Strafford (1837), contains fine things ; but the involution 
and unexpectedness of the poet's thought now and always showed 
themselves least engagingly when they were even imagined as 
being spoken not read. After yet another three years Sordello 
followed, and here the most peculiar but the least estimable side of 
the author's genius attained a prominence not elsewhere equalled, 
till in his latest stage he began to parody himself, and scarcely 
even then. Although this book does not deserve the disgusted 
contempt which used to be poured on it, though it contains many 
noble passages, and as the " story of a soul " is perfectly intelligible 
to moderate intellects, it must have occasioned some doubts and 
qualms to intelligent admirers of the poet as to whether he would 
lose himself in the paths on which he was entering. Such doubts 
must have been soon set at rest by the curious medley issued in 
parts, under the general title of Bells and Pomegranates, between 
1 84 1 and 1846. The plays here, though often striking and showing 
that the author's disabilities, though never likely to leave, were also 
not likely to master him, showed also, with the possible exception 



vi ROBERT BROWNING 271 

of the charming nondescript of Pippa Passes, no new or positively 
unexpected faculty. But certain shorter things, lyrical and other, 
at last made it clear that Browning could sing as well as say : and 
from this time, 1846 (which also was the year of his marriage with 
Miss Elizabeth Barrett), he could claim rank as a great poet. He 
had been hitherto more or less a wanderer, but with headquarters 
in England ; he now went to Florence, which in turn was his head- 
quarters till his wife's death in 1861. His publications during the 
time were only two — Christmas Eve and Easier Day \x\ 1850, and 
Men and Women in 1855. But these were both masterpieces. 
He never did better work, and, with Bells and Pomegranates and 
Dramatis Persona;, which appeared in 1864 (when, after Mrs. 
Browning's death, he had returned to London), they perhaps 
contain all his very best work. 

Up to this time, the thirty-first year from the publication of 
Pauline, Browning's work, though by no means scanty, could 
hardly be called voluminous as the result of half a life-time of 
absolute leisure. A little before Dramatis Persona; — itself not a 
long book, though of hardly surpassed quality — the whole of the 
poems except Pauline had been gathered into three small but 
thick volumes, which undoubtedly did very much to spread the 
poet's fame — a spread much helped by their immediate successors. 
The enormous poem of The Ring and the Book, originally issued 
in four volumes and containing more than twenty thousand 
verses, was published in 1869, an d> the public being by this time 
well prepared for it, received a welcome not below its merits. 
Having at last gained the public ear, Mr. Browning did not fail 
to improve the occasion, and of the next fifteen years few passed 
without a volume, while some saw two, from his pen. These, 
including translations of the Alcestis and the Agamemnon (for the 
poet was at this time seized with a great fancy for Greek, which 
he rendered with much fluency and a very singular indulgence in 
a sort of hybrid and pedantic spelling of proper names), were 
Balaustion's Adventure and Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau (1871), 
Fifine at the Fair (1872), Red Cotton Night- Cap Country (1873), 



272 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD CHAP. 

Aristophanes' Apology and The Inn Album (1875), Pacchiarotto 
and hotv he Worked in Distemper (1876), La Saisiaz (1878), 
Dramatic Idylls, two volumes (1879-80), Jocoseria (1883), and 
Ferishtah's Fancies (1884). The five remaining years of Brown- 
ing's long life were somewhat less fruitful ; but Parleyings with 
Certain People of Importance came in 1887, and at the end of 
1889, almost simultaneously with his death in Italy, Asolando, 
which some think by far his best volume since Dramatis Persona;, 
a quarter of a century older. These volumes occasionally con- 
tained a few, and Asolando contained several, of the lovely lyrics 
above referred to. But the great bulk of them consisted of the 
curious blank verse, now narrative, now ostensibly dramatic mon- 
ologue, which the poet had always affected, and which he now 
seemed to affect more and more. In them, too, from The Ring 
and the Book onwards, there appeared a tendency stronger than 
ever to an eccentric and almost burlesque phraseology, which at 
one time threatened to drown all his good qualities, as involution 
of thought had threatened to drown them in the Sordello period. 
But this danger also was averted at the last. 

Critical estimate of Browning's poetry was for years hampered 
by, and cannot even yet be said to have been quite cleared from, 
the violent prepossessions of public opinion respecting him. 
For more than a generation, in the ordinary sense, he was more 
or less passionately admired by a few devotees, stupidly or blindly 
ignored by the public in general, and persistently sneered at, 
lectured, or simply disliked by the majority of academically 
educated critics. The sharp revulsion of his later years has been 
noticed ; and it amounted almost to this, that while dislike to him 
in those who had intelligently, if somewhat narrowly, disapproved 
of his ways was not much affected, a Browning cultus, almost as 
blind as the former pooh-poohing or ignoring, set in, and extended 
from a considerable circle of ardent worshippers to the public at 
large. A " Browning Society" was founded in 1881, and received 
from the poet a kind of countenance which would certainly not 
have been extended to it by most English men of letters. During 



ROBERT BROWNING 273 



his later years handbooks solemnly addressed to neophytes in 
Browningism, as if the cult were a formal science or art, appeared 
with some frequency ; and there has been even a bulky Browning 
Dictionary, which not only expounds the more recondite (and, it is 
fair to say, tolerably frequent) allusions of the master, but provides 
for his disciples something to make up for the ordinary classical 
and other dictionaries with which, it seemed to be presumed, their 
previous education would have made them little conversant. 

This not very wise adulation in its turn not unnaturally excited 
a sort of irritation and dislike, to a certain extent renewing the 
old prejudice in a new form. To those who could discard ex- 
traneous considerations and take Browning simply as he was, 
he must, from a period which only very old men can now re- 
member, have always appeared a very great, though also a very far 
from perfect poet. His imperfections were always on the surface, 
though perhaps they were not always confined to it; and only 
uncritical partisanship could at any time have denied them, while 
some of them became noticeably worse in the period of rapid com- 
position or publication from 1870 to 18S5. A large license of 
unconventionality, and even of defiance of convention, may be 
claimed by, and should be allowed to, persons of genius such as Mr. 
Browning undoubtedly possessed. But it can hardly be denied 
that he, like his older contemporary Carlyle, whose example may 
not have been without influence upon him, did set at naught not 
merely the traditions, but the sound norms and rules of English 
phrase to a rather unnecessary extent. A beginning of deliberate 
provocation and challenge, passing into an after-period of more or 
less involuntary persistence in an exaggeration of the mannerisms 
at first more or less deliberately adopted, is apt to be shown by 
persons who set themselves in this way to innovate ; and it was 
shown by Mr. Browning. It is impossible for any intelligent 
admirer to maintain, except as a paradox, that his strange modu- 
lations, his cacophonies of rhythm and rhyme, his occasional 
adoption of the foreshortened language of the telegraph or the 
comic stage, and many other peculiarities of his, were not things 



274 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD chap. 

which a more perfect art would have either absorbed and trans- 
formed, or at least have indulged in with far less luxuriance. Nor 
does it seem much more reasonable for anybody to contend that 
his fashion of soul-dissection at a hand-gallop, in drama, in mono- 
logue, in lay sermon, was not largely, even grossly, abused. Some- 
times the thing was not worth doing at all — there are at least 
half a dozen of the books between The Ring and the Book and 
Asolando from the whole of which a judicious lover of poetry 
would not care to save more than the bulk of the smallest of 
them should they be menaced with entire destruction. Even 
in the best of these what is good could generally, if not always, 
have been put at the length of the shorter Meti and Women with 
no loss, nay, with great advantage. The obscurity so much 
talked of was to some extent from the very first, and to the last 
continued to be, in varying degrees, an excuse, or at least an 
occasion, for putting at great length thought that was not always 
so far from commonplace as it looked into expression which was 
very often not so much original as unkempt. " Less matter with 
more art " was the demand which might have been made of Mr. 
Browning from first to last, and with increasing instance as he 
became more popular. 

But though no competent lover of poetry can ever have denied 
the truth and cogency of these objections, the admission of them 
can never, in any competent lover of poetry, have obscured or 
prevented an admiration of Browning none the less intense 
because not wholly unreserved. Even his longer poems, in 
which his faults were most apparent, possessed an individuality 
of the first order, combined the intellectual with no small 
part of the sensual attraction of poetry after a fashion not other- 
wise paralleled in England since Dryden, and provided an 
extraordinary body of poetical exercise and amusement. The 
pathos, the power, at times the humour, of the singular soul- 
studies which he was so fond of projecting with little accessory 
of background upon his canvas, could not be denied, and have 
not often been excelled. If he was not exactly what is commonly 



ROBERT BROWNING 275 



called orthodox in religion, and if his philosophy was of a dis- 
tinctly vague order, he was always " on the side of the angels " 
in theology, in metaphysics, in ethics ; and his politics, if exceed- 
ingly indistinct and unpractical, were always noble and generous. 
Further, though he seems to have been utterly destitute of the 
slightest gift of dramatic construction, he had no mean share of 
a much rarer gift, that of dramatic character ; and in a century 
of descriptions of nature his, if not the most exquisite, have a 
freedom and truth, a largeness of outline combined with felicity 
of colour, not elsewhere to be discovered. 

But it is as a lyric poet that Browning ranks highest ; and in 
this highest class it is impossible to refuse him all but the highest 
rank, in some few cases the very highest. He understood love 
pretty thoroughly ; and when a lyric poet understands love 
thoroughly there is little doubt of his position. But he under- 
stood many other things as well, and could give strange and 
delightful voice to them. Even his lyrics, still more his short 
non-lyrical poems, admirable as they often are, and closely as 
they group with the lyrics proper, are not untouched by his 
inseparable defect. He cannot be prevented from inserting 
now and then in the midst of exquisite passages more or fewer 
of his quirks and cranks of thought and phrase, of his 
vernacularity or his euphuism, of his outrageous rhymes (which, 
however, are seldom or never absolutely bad), of those fantastic 
tricks of his in general which remind one of nothing so much 
as of dashing a bladder with rattling peas in the reader's face 
just at the height of the passion or the argument. 

Yet the beauty, the charm, the variety, the vigour of these 
short poems are as wonderful as the number of them. He 
never lost the secret of them to his latest years. The delicious 
lines " Never the time and the place, And the loved one 
all together " are late ; and there are half a dozen pieces in 
Asolando, latest of all, which exhibit to the full the almost 
bewildering beauty of combined sound, thought, and sight, the 
clash of castanets and the thrill of flutes, the glow of flower and 



276 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD chap, 

sunset, the subtle appeal for sympathy in feeling or assent in 
judgment. The song snatches in Pippa Passes, " Through the 
Metidja," "The Lost Leader," "In a Gondola," "Earth's Im- 
mortalities," " Mesmerism," " Women and Roses," " Love Among 
the Ruins," "A Toccata of Galuppis," " Prospice," "Rabbi Ben 
Ezra," " Porphyria's Lover," " After," with scores of others, and 
the "Last Ride Together," the poet's most perfect thing, at the 
head of the list, are such poems as a very few — Shakespeare, 
Shelley, Burns, Coleridge — may surpass now and then in pure 
lyrical perfection, as Tennyson may excel in dreamy ecstasy, 
as some seventeenth century songsters may outgo in quaint and 
perfect fineness of touch, but such as are nowhere to be surpassed 
or equalled for a certain volume and variety of appeal, for fulness 
of life and thought, of action and passion. 

Mr. Browning's wife, Elizabeth Barrett, was older than himself 
by six years, and her period of popularity considerably anticipated 
his. But except one very juvenile book she published nothing 
of importance till 1838, when Browning, whom she did not then 
know, had already manifested his idiosyncrasy. Miss Barrett, 
whose father's original name was Moulton, was born at Carlton 
Hall, Durham, on 6th March 1S06. The change of name was 
brought on by succession to estates in the West Indies ; and the 
family were wealthy. For the greater part of Miss Barrett's 
youth they lived in Herefordshire at a place, Hope End, which 
has left great traces on her early poetry ; later her headquarters 
were in London, with long excursions to Devonshire. These 
excursions were mainly caused by bad health, from which, as 
well as from family bereavements, Miss Barrett was a great 
sufferer. She had read widely ; she began to write as a mere 
child ; and her studies extended even to Greek, though in a 
rather amateurish and desultory fashion. Her Essay on Mind 
and other poems appeared in 1825; but a considerable interval, 
as noted above, elapsed before, in The Seraphim and other poems, 
she gave, if not a truer, a more characteristic note. And two 
more intervals of exactly the same length gave Poems 1846 and 



MRS. BROWNING 



277 



Poems 1850, containing most of her best work. Meanwhile 
she had met Robert Browning, and had married him, rather 
against the wish of her family, in 1846. The rest of her life was 
spent mostly at Florence, where, in 1849, the on ty child of 
the marriage was born. Two years later appeared Casa Guidi 
Windows and the long " sociological " romance of Aurora Leigh. 
In these, and still more in the Poems before Congress (i860), a 
not unnatural tendency to echo the peculiar form and spirit of 
her husband's work is observable, not by any means always or 
frequently to advantage. She died at Florence on 30th June 
1 86 1, and next year a volume of Last Poems was issued. The 
most interesting document in regard to her since has been her 
Letters to R. H. Home, the author of Orion, which were published 
in 1876. 

It has been said that Mrs. Browning's popularity long antici- 
pated her husband's; indeed, years after her death, and on the 
very eve of the publication of The Ring and the Book, it was 
possible to meet persons, not uncultivated, who were fairly well 
acquainted with her verse and entirely ignorant of his. The case 
has since been altered ; but it is believed that Mrs. Browning 
still retains, and it is probable that she will always retain, no 
small measure of general favour. It has been usual to speak of 
her as the chief English poetess, which she certainly is if bulk 
and character of work as distinguished from perfection of work- 
manship are considered. Otherwise, she must as certainly give 
place to Miss Christina Rossetti. But Mrs. Browning no doubt 
combined, in very unusual and interesting manner, the qualities 
which appeal to what may be called, with no disdainful inten- 
tion, the crowd of readers of poetry, and those which appeal 
to the elect. Even the peculiarities which lent themselves so 
easily to parody — and some of the happiest parodies ever written 
were devoted to her in Bon Gaultier and other books — did not 
serve her badly with the general, for a parody always in a way 
attracts attention to the original. Although her expression was 
not always of the very clearest, its general drift was never easily 



278 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD chap. 

mistakable ; and though she was wont to enshrine her emotions 
in something of a mist of mysticism, they were in the main simple 
and human enough. It must also be admitted that pathetic 
sentiment is almost the surest of popular appeals in poetry ; and 
Miss Barrett — partly through physical suffering, partly through 
the bereavements above referred to, but very mainly it may be 
suspected by temperament and preference — was much more a 
visitant of the House of Mourning than of the House of Mirth. 
She was, yet again, profoundly and sincerely, if a little vaguely, 
religious : and her sacred poems, of which the famous and 
beautiful " Cowper's Grace" is the chief example, secured one 
portion of the public to her as firmly as the humanitarianism of 
"The Cry of the Children," chiming in with famous things of 
Hood and Dickens, did another ; " Isobel's Child," a pathetic 
domesticity, a third ; the somewhat gushing and undistinguished 
Romanticism of " The Duchess May " and "The Brown Rosary," 
a fourth; and the ethical and political "noble sentiments" of 
" Lady Geraldine's Courtship," a fifth. 

But it would argue gross unfairness in an advocate, and gross 
incompetence in a critic, to let it be supposed that these popular 
attractions were the only ones that Mrs. Browning possessed. 
Despite and besides the faults which will be presently noticed, 
and which, critically speaking, are very grave faults, she had 
poetical merits of a very high order. Her metrical faculty, 
though constantly flawed and imperfect, was very original and 
full of musical variety. Although her choice of words could by 
no means always be commended, her supply of them was ex- 
traordinary. Before her imprisonment in sick-rooms she had 
pored on nature with the eagerest and most observant eye, and 
that imprisonment itself only deepened the intensity of her 
remembered nature-worship. Her pathos, if it sometimes over- 
flowed into gush, was quite unquestionable in sincerity and most 
powerful in appeal ; her sentiment was always pure and generous ; 
and it is most curious to see how in the noble directness of such 
a piece as " Lord Walter's Wife," not only her little faults of 



MRS. BROWNING 



279 



sensiblerie, but her errors of diction, are burnt and smelted out 
by the fire of the expressed impression. Her verse-pictures — 
for instance those in the "Vision of Poets" — vie, in beauty if 
not in clearness of composition and definition, with Tennyson's 
own. The Romantic pieces already glanced at, obnoxious and 
obvious as are their defects, unite the pathos and the picturesque- 
ness just assigned to her in a most remarkable manner. And 
when, especially in the Sonnet, she consented to undergo the 
limitations of a form which almost automatically restrained her 
voluble facility, the effect was often simply of the first order. 
The exquisite "Sonnets from the Portuguese" (which are not 
from the Portuguese, and are understood to have been addressed 
to Mr. Browning), especially that glorious one beginning — 

If thou wilt love me, let it be for naught 
Except for love's sake only — 

(which is not far below Shakespeare's or the great thing which 
was published as Drayton's), rank with the noblest efforts of the 
i6th-i7th century in this exquisite form. And if this, instead of 
having to conform to the requirements of a connected history, 
were a separate study of Mrs. Browning, it would be necessary to 
mention scores of separate pieces full of varied beauty. 

But in no poet, perhaps not even in Byron, are such great 
beauties associated with such astonishing defects as in Mrs. Brown- 
ing ; some of these defects being so disgusting as well as so strange 
that it requires not a little critical detachment to put her, on the 
whole, as high as she deserves to be put. Like almost all women 
who have written, she was extremely deficient in self-criticism, 
and positively pampered and abused her natural tendency towards 
fluent volubility. There is hardly one of the pieces named above, 
outside the sonnets, with the exception certainly of " Lord Walter's 
Wife " and possibly of " Cowper's Grave," which would not be 
immensely improved by compression and curtailment, "The 
Rhyme of the Duchess May " being a special example. In other 
pieces not yet specified, such as "The Romaunt of Margret," 



280 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD chap. 

" Bianca among the Nightingales," and especially " The Poet's 
Vow," the same defect is painfully felt. That the poetess fre- 
quently, and especially in her later poetical work, touches sub- 
jects which she does not very well comprehend, and which are 
very doubtfully suited for poetical treatment at all, is a less im- 
portant because a more controversial objection ; and the merits 
of such a book as Aurora Leigh depend so much upon the argu- 
ing out of the general question whether what is practically a 
modern novel has any business to be written in verse, that they 
perhaps can receive no adequate treatment here. But as to the 
fatal fluency of Mrs. Browning there can be no question before 
any tribunal which knows its own jurisdiction and its own code. 
And that fluency extends to more than length. The vocabulary 
is wilfully and tastelessly unusual, — " abele " rhymed " abeel " 
for " poplar " ; American forms such as " human " for " human- 
ity " and " weaken " for a neuter verb ; fustianish words like 
" reboant " ; awkward suggestions of phrase, such as " droppings 
of warm tears." 

But all these things, and others put together, are not so fatal 
as her extraordinary dulness of ear in the matter of rhyme. 
She endeavoured to defend her practice in this respect in the 
correspondence with Home, but it is absolutely indefensible. 
What is known as assonance, that is to say, vowel rhyme only, 
as in Old French and in Spanish, is not in itself objectionable, 
though it is questionably suited to English. But Mrs. Browning's 
eccentricities do not as a rule, though they sometimes do, lie in 
the direction of assonance. They are simply bad and vulgar 
rhymes — rhymes which set the teeth on edge. Thus, when she 
rhymes "palace" and "chalice," "evermore" and "emperor," 
"Onora" and "o'er her," or, most appalling of all, "mountain" 
and " daunting," it is impossible not to remember with a shud- 
der that every omnibus conductor does shout " Pal//>," that the 
common Cockney would pronounce it "Onorer," that the vulgar 
ear is deaf to the difference between ore and or, and that it is 
possible to find persons not always of the costermonger class 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 



who would make of " mountain " something very like " mau- 
unting." In other words, Mrs. Browning deliberately, or lazily, 
or for want of ear, admits false pronunciation to save her the 
trouble of an exact rhyme. Nay, more, despite her Greek, she 
will rhyme "idyll" to "middle," and "pyramidal" to "idle," 
though nothing can be longer than the i in the first case, and 
nothing shorter than the i in the second. The positive anguish 
which such hideous false notes as these must cause to any one 
with a delicate ear, the maddening interruption to the delight of 
these really beautiful pieces of poetry, cannot be over-estimated. 
It is fair to say that among the later fruit of her poetical tree there 
are fewer of these Dead Sea apples, — her husband, who, though 
audacious, was not vulgar in his rhymes, may have taught her 
better. But to her earlier, more spontaneous, and more charac- 
teristic verse they are a most terrible drawback, such as no other 
English poet exhibits or suffers. 

No poets at all approaching the first class can be said to have 
been born within a decade either way of Tennyson and Browning, 
though some extremely interesting writers of verse of about the 
same date will have to be noticed in the latter part of this chapter. 
The next year that produced a poet almost if not quite great, 
though one of odd lapses and limitations, was 1822, the birth- 
year of Matthew Arnold. When a writer has produced both 
prose and verse, or prose of distinctly different kinds in which 
one division or kind was very far superior in intrinsic value and 
extrinsic importance to the others, it has seemed best here to 
notice all his work together. But in the case of Mr. Arnold, as 
in some others, this is not possible, the volume, the character, 
and the influence of his work in creative verse and critical prose 
alike demanding separate treatment for the two sections. He 
was the eldest son of Dr. Arnold, the famous headmaster of 
Rugby, and was educated first at the two schools, Winchester 
and Rugby itself, with which his father was connected as scholar 
and master, and then at Balliol, where he obtained a scholarship 
in 1840. He took the Newdigate in 1844, and was elected a fellow 



282 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD CHAP. 

of Oriel in 1845. After some work as private secretary, he received 
an inspectorship of schools, and held it until nearly the time of his 
death in 1888. He had been Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 
1857-67. He published poetry early, and though his fame at 
this time was never very wide, he was known to those interested in 
poetry, and especially to Oxford men, for more than twenty years 
before he acquired popularity as a critic and began the remarkable 
series of prose works which will be noticed in a later chapter. So 
early as 1849 he had published, under the initial of his surname 
only, The Strayed Reveller, and other Poems ; but his poetical 
building was not securely founded until 1853, when there appeared, 
with a very remarkable preface, a collection of Poems, which was 
certainly the best thing that had been produced by any one 
younger than the two masters already discussed. Merope, which 
followed in 1858, was an attempt at an English-Greek drama, 
which, with Mr. Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon and Erechtheus, 
is perhaps the best of a somewhat mistaken kind, for Shelley's 
Prometheus Unbound soars far above the kind itself. Official duty 
first, and the growing vogue of his prose writing later, prevented 
Mr. Arnold from issuing very many volumes of verse. But his 
New Poems in 1867 made important additions, and in this way 
and that his poetical production reached by the time of his death 
no inconsiderable volume — perhaps five hundred pages averaging 
thirty lines each, or very much more than has made the reputation 
of some English poets of very high rank. Until late in his own 
life the general tendency was not to take Mr. Arnold very 
seriously as a poet ; and there are still those who reproach him 
with too literary a character, who find fault with him as thin and 
wanting in spontaneity. On the other hand, there are some who 
not only think him happier in verse than in prose, but consider 
him likely to take, when the "firm perspective of the past" has 
dispelled mirages and false estimates, a position very decidedly 
on the right side of the line which divides the great from the 
not great. 

Family, local, and personal reasons (for Dr. Arnold had a 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 283 



house in the immediate vicinity of Rydal), as well as the strong 
contemporary set in favour of Wordsworth which prevailed in both 
universities between 1830 and 1845, caused Mr. Arnold early to 
take a distinctly Wordsworthian bent. He was, later, somewhat 
outspoken in his criticism of Wordsworth's weaker points ; but it 
is impossible for any one to read his own poems without perceiving 
that Arnold stands in a line of filiation from Milton, with a slight 
deviation by way of Gray, through Wordsworth, though with a 
strong personal element in his verse. This personal element, 
besides other things, represents perhaps more powerfully than it 
represents anything else, and than anything else represents this, a 
certain reaction from the ornate and fluent Romanticism of the 
school of Keats and Tennyson. Both, especially the latter, in- 
fluenced Mr. Arnold consciously and unconsciously. But con- 
sciously he was striving against both to set up a neo-classic ideal 
as against the Romantic ; and unconsciously he was endeav- 
ouring to express a very decided, though a perhaps not entirely 
genial or masculine, personal temperament. In other words, Mr. 
Arnold is on one side a poet of " correctness " — a new correctness 
as different from that of Pope as his own time, character, and 
cultivation were from Pope's, but still correctness, that is to say 
a scheme of literature which picks and chooses according to 
standards, precedents, systems, rather than one which, given an 
abundant stream of original music and representation, limits the 
criticising province in the main to making the thing given the best 
possible of its kind. And it is not a little curious that his own 
work is by no means always the best of its kind — that it would 
often be not a little the better for a stricter application of critical 
rules to itself. 

But when it is at its best it has a wonderful charm — a charm 
nowhere else to be matched among our dead poets of this century. 
Coleridge was perhaps, allowing for the fifty years between them, 
as good a scholar as Mr. Arnold, and he was a greater poet ; but 
save for a limited time he never had his faculties under due 
command, or gave the best of his work. Scott, Byron, Keats, 



284 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD chap. 

were not scholars at all ; Shelley and Tennyson not critical 
scholars ; Rossetti a scholar only in modern languages. And 
none of these except Coleridge, whatever their mere knowledge 
or instruction, had the critical vein, the knack of comparing and 
adjusting, at all strongly developed. Many attempts have been 
made at a formula of which the following words are certainly not 
a perfect expression, that a poet without criticism is a failure, and 
that a critic who is a poet is a miracle. Mr. Arnold is beyond all 
doubt the writer who has most nearly combined the two gifts. 
But for the present we are only concerned with his poetry. 

This shows itself distinctly enough, and perhaps at not far from 
its best, in almost his earliest work. Among this earliest is the 
magnificent sonnet on Shakespeare which perhaps better deserves 
to be set as an epigraph and introduction to Shakespeare's own 
work than anything else in the libraries that have been written 
on him except Dryden's famous sentence ; " Mycerinus," a stately 
blending of well-arranged six-lined stanzas with a splendid finale 
of blank verse not quite un-Tennysonian, but slightly different 
from Tennyson's ; " The Church of Brou," unequal but beautiful 
in the close (it is a curious and almost a characteristic thing that 
Matthew Arnold's finales, his perorations, were always his best); 
" Requiescat," an exquisite dirge. To this early collection, too, 
belongs almost the whole of the singular poem or collection of 
poems called " Switzerland," a collection much .rehandled in the 
successive editions of Mr. Arnold's work, and exceedingly unequal, 
but containing, in the piece which begins — 

Yes ! in the sea of life enisled, 

one of the noblest poems of its class which the century has 
produced; the mono-dramatic "Strayed Reveller," which as 
mentioned above is one of the very earliest of all ; and the more 
fully dramatised and longer " Empedocles on Etna," in regard to 
which Mr. Arnold showed a singular vacillation, issuing it, with- 
drawing nearly all of it, and than issuing it again. Its design, 
like that of the somewhat later " Merope," is not of the happiest, but 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 285 



it contains some lyrical pieces which are among the best-known 
and the best of their author's work. Early too, if not of the 
earliest, are certain longer narrative or semi-narrative poems, not 
seldom varied with or breaking into lyric — " Sohrab and Rustum " 
with another of the fine closes referred to, perhaps indeed the 
finest of all; "The Sick King in Bokhara"; "Balder Dead"; 
"Tristram and Iseult" ; " The Scholar-Gipsy," a most admirable 
"poem of place," being chiefly devoted to the country round 
Oxford; "Thyrsis " (an elegy on Clough which by some is ranked 
not far below Lycidas and Adonais) . But perhaps Mr. Arnold's 
happiest vein, like that of most of the poets of the last two-thirds 
of the century, lay, not in long poems but in shorter pieces, 
more or less lyrical in form but not precisely lyrics — in short of 
the same general class (though differing often widely enough in 
subject and handling) as those in which the main appeal of Tennyson 
himself has been said to consist. Such is "The Forsaken Merman," 
the poet's most original and perhaps most charming if not his 
deepest or most elaborate thing — a piece of exquisite and passion- 
ate music modulated with art as touching as it is consummate ; 
" Dover Beach," where the peculiar religious attitude, with the 
expression of which so much of Mr. Arnold's prose is concerned, 
finds a more restrained and a very melodious voice ; the half- 
satiric, half-meditative " Bacchanalia " ; the fine " Summer Night " ; 
the Memorial Verses (Mr. Arnold was a frequent and a skilled 
attempter of epicedes) on Wordsworth, on Heine, and on the dog 
Geist ; with, almost latest of all and not least noble, "Westminster 
Abbey," the opening passages of which vie in metre (though of a 
more complicated mould) and in majesty with Milton's " Nativity 
Ode," and show a wonderful ability to bear this heavy burden of 
comparison. 

Perhaps these last words may not unfairly hint at a defect — if 
not the defect — of this refined, this accomplished, but this often 
disappointing poetry. Quite early, in the preface before referred 
to, the poet had run up and nailed to the mast a flag-theory of 
poetic art to which he always adhered as far as theory went, and 



286 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD chap. 

which it may be reasonably supposed he always endeavoured to 
exemplify in practice. According to this "all depends on the 
subject," and the fault of most modern poetry and of nearly all 
modern criticism is that the poets strive to produce and the critics 
expect to receive, not an elaborately planned and adjusted treat- 
ment of a great subject, but touches or bursts of more or less 
beautiful thought and writing. Now of course it need not be 
said that in the very highest poetry the excellence of the subject, 
the complete appropriateness of the treatment, and the beauty of 
patches and passages, all meet together. But it will also happen 
that this is not so. And then the poet of " the subject " will 
not only miss the happy "jewels five words long," the gracious 
puffs and cat's paws of the wind of the spirit, that his less austere 
brother secures, but will not make so very much of his subjects, 
of his schemes of treatment themselves. His ambition, as 
ambition so often does, will over-reach itself, and he will have 
nothing to show but the unfinished fragments of a poetical 
Escurial instead of the finished chantries and altar-tombs which 
a less formal architect is able to boast. 

However this may be, two things are certain, the first that the 
best work of Matthew Arnold in verse bears a somewhat small 
proportion to the work that is not his best, and that his worst is 
sometimes strangely unworthy of him ; the second, that the best 
where it appears is of surpassing charm — uniting in a way, of which 
Andrew Marvell is perhaps the best other example in English lyric, 
romantic grace, feeling, and music to a classical and austere pre- 
cision of style, combining nobility of thought with grace of ex- 
pression, and presenting the most characteristically modern ideas 
of his own particular day with. an almost perfect freedom from 
the jargon of that day, and in a key always suggesting the great 
masters, the great thinkers, the great poets of the past. To those 
who are in sympathy with his own way of thinking he must always 
possess an extraordinary attraction ; perhaps he is not least, though 
he may be more discriminatingly, admired by those who are very 
much out of sympathy with him on not a few points of subject, but 



vi PR/E-RAPHAELITISM 287 

who are one with him in the Humanities — in the sense and the 
love of the great things in literature. 

The natural and logical line of development, however, from 
the originators of the Romantic movement through Keats and 
Tennyson did not lie through Matthew Arnold ; and the time 
was not yet ripe — it can perhaps hardly be said to be ripe yet — 
for a reaction in his sense. He was, as has been said, a branch 
from Wordsworth, only slightly influenced by Tennyson himself, 
than whom indeed he was not so very much younger. The direct 
male line of descent lay in another direction ; and its next most 
important stage was determined by the same causes which almost 
at the middle of the century or a little before brought about Pras- 
Raphaelitism in art. Both of these were closely connected with 
the set of events called the Oxford Movement, about which much 
has been written, but of which the far-reaching significance, not 
merely in religion but in literature, politics, art, and almost 
things in general, has never yet been fully estimated. As far as 
literature is concerned, and this special part of literature with 
which we are here dealing, this movement had partly shown 
and partly shaped the direction of the best minds towards the 
Middle Ages, which had been begun by Percy's Reliques in a 
vague and blind sort of way, and which had been strengthened, 
directed, but still not altogether fashioned according to knowledge, 
by Scott and Coleridge. 

This movement which dominates the whole English poetry of 
the later half of the century with the exception of that produced 
by a few survivors of the older time, and to which no successor 
of equal brilliancy and fertility has yet made its appearance, is 
popularly represented by three writers, two of whom, Mr. William 
Morris and Mr. Swinburne, are fortunately still alive, and there- 
fore fall out of our province. Rossetti, the eldest of the three, 
a great influence on both, and as it happens an example unique 
in all history of combined excellence in poetry and painting, has 
passed away for some years, and will give us quite sufficient text 
for explaining the development and illustrating its results without 



288 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD chap. 

outstripping the limits traced in the preface to this book ; while his 
sister, and a distinguished junior member of the school, also dead, 
Mr. Arthur O'Shaughnessy, may profitably be brought in to com- 
plete the illustration. 

Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, generally known as Dante 
Gabriel Rossetti, was born in London on 12th May 1828. He 
was the son of an Italian poet and critic of eminence, who, like 
so many of his countrymen of literary tastes during the early 
part of the century, had fallen into the Carbonaro movement, 
and who had to fly first to Malta and then to England. Here 
he married Miss Polidori, whose mother was an Englishwoman ; 
and his four children — the two exquisite poets below dealt with, 
Mr. W. M. Rossetti, a competent critic, and Maria Francesca, 
the eldest daughter, who wrote an excellent introduction to 
Dante — all made contributions, and two of them great contri- 
butions, to English literature. The father himself, who was 
Professor of Italian at King's College, London, was an enthusi- 
astic though rather a fantastic Dantist, and somewhat of a vision- 
ary generally, with wild notions about mediaeval secret societies ; 
but a man of the greatest honesty and honour, and a brilliant 
contrast to the various patriot-charlatans, from Ugo Foscolo 
downwards, who brought discredit on the Italian name in his 
time in England. These particulars, of a kind seldom given 
in this book, are not otiose ; for they have much to do with the 
singular personality of our English Rossetti himself. 

He was educated at King's College School ; but his leanings 
towards art were so strong that at the age of fifteen he began the 
study of it, leaving school to draw at the Royal Academy and 
elsewhere. His art career and the formation of the P.R.B. 
(Prae-Raphaelite Brotherhood) unfortunately fall outside our 
sphere. It is enough to say that for some twenty years Rossetti, 
if he was known at all (and he was never known very widely nor 
did he ever seek notoriety) was known as a painter only, though 
many who only knew his poems later conceived the most 
passionate admiration for his painting. Yet he wrote almost as 



ROSSETTI 289 



early as he painted, contributing to the famous Prse-Raphaelite 
magazine, the Germ, in 1850, to the remarkable Oxford and 
Cambridge Magazine, which also saw the early work of Mr. 
Morris, in 1856, and publishing some translations from The Early 
Italian Poets in 1861. He had married the year before this last 
date and was about to publish Poems which he had been writing 
from an early age. But his wife died in 1862, and in a fit of 
despair he buried his MSS. in her coffin. They were years after- 
wards exhumed and the Poems appeared in 1870. Eleven years 
later another volume of Ballads and Sonnets was published, and 
Rossetti, whose health in the interval had been much shattered, 
and who had unfortunately sought refuge from insomnia in 
chloral, died next year in April 1882. The last years of his life 
were not happy, and he was most unnecessarily affected by attacks 
on the first arrangement of his Poems. 

These poems had a certain advantage in being presented to a 
public already acquainted with the work of Mr. Morris and Mr. 
Swinburne ; but Rossetti was not merely older than his two 
friends, he was also to some extent their master. At the same 
time the influences which acted on him were naturally diverse 
from those which, independently of his own influence, acted on 
them. For the French and English mediaeval inspirations of 
Mr. Morris, for the classical and general study of Mr. Swinburne, 
he had his ancestral Italians almost for sole teachers ; and for 
their varied interests he had his own art of painting for a con- 
tinual companion, reminder, and model. Yet the mediaeval 
impulse is almost equally strong on all three, and its intensity 
shows that it was the real dominant of the moment in English 
poetry. The opening poem of Rossetti's first book, "The 
Blessed Damozel," which is understood to have been written 
very early, though afterwards wrought up by touches both of 
his love for his wife while living and of his regret for her when 
dead, is almost a typical example of the whole style and school, 
though it is individualised by the strong pictorial element rarely 
absent from his work. The " Blessed Damozel " herself, who 



290 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD chap. 

" leaned out From the gold Bar of Heaven," is a figure from the 
Paradiso, divested of the excessive abstraction of that part of 
Dante, and clothed partly in the gayer colours and more fleshly 
personality of English and French medievalism, partly in a mysti- 
cal halo which is peculiar to these nineteenth century re-creations 
of mediaeval thought and feeling. The poem is of extreme beauty, 
and ornate as is its language in parts there are touches, such as 
the poet's reflection 

To one it is ten years of years, 
which utter the simplest truth and tenderness ; while others, such 
as the enumeration of the Virgin's handmaidens (over which at 
the time the hoofs of earless critics danced) — 

With her five handmaidens, whose names 
Are five sweet symphonies — 
Cecily, Gertrude, Magdalen, 
Margaret and Rosalys — 

are consummate triumphs of the word-music brought by Tenny- 
son into English poetry. Indeed this couplet of names might 
be made a sort of text to expound the great appeal to the ear of 
this kind of poetry, which any one who is deaf to the exceptional 
and golden harmony of the arrangement need never hope to 
appreciate. It is perfectly easy to change the order in many 
ways without affecting the verse ; there is absolutely none of these 
combinations which approaches the actual one in beauty of sound 
and suggestion. 

" Love's Nocturn " which follows is more of the early Italian 
school pure and simple ; and " Troy Town," a ballad with burdens, 
is one of a class of poem much affected by Rossetti and ever 
since, which has produced some admirable work, but is perhaps 
a little open to the charge of too deliberate archaism. It is at any 
rate far inferior to his own "Sister Helen." But "The Burden 
of Nineveh " which follows is in a quite different style, and 
besides its intrinsic excellence is noteworthy as showing how very 
far Rossetti was from being limited in his choice of manners. 
But to go through the whole contents of this very remarkable 



ROSSETTI 291 



volume would be impossible, and we can only particularise the 
great sonnet-sequence "The House of Life "(which was attacked 
for want of decency with as little intelligence as "The Blessed 
Damozel" had been attacked for want of sense), and a set "for 
pictures." The first, somewhat thorny and obscure in language, is 
of extreme poetical and philosophical beauty. The latter, beautiful 
enough, may be said to lend themselves a little to the attacks of 
those critics who charged Rossetti with, in the Aristotelian phrase, 
" shifting his ground to another kind " or (to vary the words) 
of taking the quotation /// pictitra pocsis in too literal a sense. 
Some songs, especially " Penumbra " and " The Woodspurge," of 
intense sweetness and sadness, were also included ; and the 
simple directness of " Jenny " showed, like " Nineveh," capacities 
in the poet not easily to be inferred from the bulk of his poems. 

Rossetti's second volume, while it added only too little to the 
bulk of his work — for much of it consisted of a revised issue of 
"The House of Life" — added greatly to its enjoyment. But it 
produced no new kind, unless certain extensions of the ballad- 
scheme into narrative poems of considerable length — " Rose- 
Mary," "The White Ship," and "The King's Tragedy" — be 
counted as such. " Rose-Mary " in particular exhibits the merits 
and defects of the poet in almost the clearest possible light, and 
it may be safely said" that no English poet, not the very greatest, 
need have been ashamed of such a stanza as this, where there is 
no affectation worth speaking of, where the eternal and immortal 
commonplaces of poetry are touched to newness as only a master 
touches, and where the turn of the phrase and verse is impeccable 
and supreme : — 

And lo ! on the ground Rose-Mary lay, 
With a cold brow like the snows ere May, 
With a cold breast like the earth till Spring — 
With such a smile as the June days bring 
When the year grows warm for harvesting. 

Here, as elsewhere, it has seemed better to postpone most 
of the necessary general criticism of schools and groups till the 



292 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD chap. 

concluding chapter, but in this particular respect the paucity 
of individuals which our scheme leaves (though Miss Rossetti 
and Mr. O'Shaughnessy will give valuable assistance presently), 
may make a few words desirable, even if they be partly repetition 
and partly anticipation. We find in Rossetti a strong influence 
of pictorial on poetic art ; an overpowering tendency to revert 
to the forms and figures, the sense and sentiment of the past, 
especially the mediaeval past ; and a further tendency to a 
mysticism which is very often, if not always, poetic in character, 
as indeed mysticism generally if not always is. We find in 
point of form a distinct preference for lyric over other kinds, a 
fancy for archaic language and schemes of verse, a further fancy 
for elaborate and ornate language (which does not, however, 
exclude perfect simplicity when the poet chooses), and above all, 
a predilection for attempting and a faculty for achieving effects 
of verbal music by cunning adjustment of vowel and consonant 
sound which, though it had been anticipated partially, and as it 
were accidentally in the seventeenth century, and had been after 
the Romantic revival displayed admirably by Coleridge and Keats, 
and brought to a high pitch by Tennyson, was even further 
elaborated and polished by the present school. Indeed, they 
may be said to have absolutely finished this poetical appeal as a 
distinct and deliberate one. All poets have always attempted, 
and all poets always will attempt, and when they are great, 
achieve these enchanting effects of mere sound. But for some 
considerable time it will not be possible (indeed it will be quite 
impossible until the structure, the intonation, the phrase of 
English have taken such turns as will develop physical possibili- 
ties as different from those of our language as ours are from those 
of the seventeenth century) for any poets to get distinctly great 
effects in the same way. It is proof enough of this that, except 
the masters, no poet for many years now has achieved a great 
effect by this means, and that the most promising of the newer 
school, whether they may or may not have found a substitute, 
are abandoning it. 



MISS ROSSETTI 293 



Rossetti's younger, but very little younger, sister, Christina 
Georgina, was born in 1830, sat to her brother early for the charm- 
ing picture of "The Girlhood of Mary Virgin," and is said also 
to figure in his illustration of the weeping queens in Tennyson's 
Morte D 1 Arthur. But she lived an exceedingly quiet life, 
mainly occupied in attention to her mother and in devotion ; 
for she had been brought up, and all her life remained, a mem- 
ber of the Church of England. Her religious feelings more and 
more coloured her poetical work, which was produced at intervals 
from 1 86 1 till close upon her death in the winter of 1894-95. It 
was not hastily written, and latterly formed mainly the embellish- 
ment of certain prose books of religious reflection or excerpt. 
But it was always of an exquisite quality. Its first expression in 
book form was Goblin Market, and other Poems (1861), which, 
as well as her next volume, The Prince's Progress (1866), was 
illustrated by her brother's pencil. A rather considerable time 
then passed without anything of importance (a book called Sing- 
Song excepted), till in 1881 A Pageant, and other Poems was 
added. A collection of all these was issued nine years later, but 
with this the gleanings from the devotional works above mentioned 
(the chief of which were Time Flies and The Face of the Deep) 
have still to be united. 

There are those who seriously maintain Miss Rossetti's claim 
to the highest rank among English poetesses, urging that she 
excels Mrs. Browning, her only possible competitor, in freedom 
from blemishes of form and from the liability to fall into silliness 
and maudlin gush, at least as much as she falls short of her in 
variety and in power of shaping a poem of considerable bulk. 
But without attempting a too rigid classification we may cer- 
tainly say that Miss Rossetti has no superior among English- 
women who have had the gift of poetry. In the title-piece of 
her first book the merely quaint side of Prse-Raphaelitism perhaps 
appears rather too strongly, though very agreeably to some. But 
"Dreamland," "Winter Rain," "An End," "Echo," the exqui- 
site song for music "When I am dead, my dearest," and the 



294 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD chap. 

wonderful devotional pieces called "The Three Enemies" and 
" Sleep at Sea," with many charming sonnets, adorned a volume 
which, on the whole, showed more of the tendencies of the 
school than any which had yet appeared. For it was less 
exclusively mediaeval than Mr. Morris' Defence of Guinevere, 
and very much more varied as well as more mature than 
Mr. Swinburne's Queen Mother and Rosamond. The Prince's 
Progress showed a great advance on Goblin Market in dignity 
and freedom from mannerism, and the minor poems in general 
rivalled those in the earlier collection, though the poetess per- 
haps never quite equalled " Sleep at Sea." The contents of 
A Pageant, and other Poems were at once more serious and lighter 
than those of the two former books (for Miss Rossetti, like her 
brother, had a strong touch of humour), while the Collected Poems 
added some excellent pieces. But the note of the whole had 
been struck, as is usually the case with good poets who do not 
publish too early, at the very first. 

The most distinguished members, with the exception of Mr. 
and Miss Rossetti, of this school are still alive ; and, as it did not 
become fashionable until about five-and-twenty years ago, even 
the junior members of it have in but few cases been sent to that 
majority of which alone we treat. Mr. John Addington Symonds, 
an important writer of prose, began early and never abandoned 
the practice of verse, but his accomplishment in it was never 
more than an accomplishment. Mr. Philip Bourke Marston, son 
of Dr. Westland Marston, the dramatist, was highly reputed as 
a poet by his friends, but friendship and compassion (he was 
blind) had perhaps more to do with this reputation than strict 
criticism. The remarkable talents of Mr. Gerard Manley Hop- 
kins, which could never be mistaken by any one who knew him, 
and of which some memorials remain in verse, were mainly lost 
to English poetry by the fact of his passing the last twenty years 
of his life as a Jesuit priest. But the most characteristic figure 
now passed away was Arthur O'Shaughnessy (1844-81). He 
was an official of the British Museum, and published three 



O'SHAUGHNESSY 



295 



volumes of poetry — The Epic of Women (1870), Lays of France 
(1872), and Music and Moonlight (1874) — which were completed 
in the year of his death by a posthumous volume entitled Songs of 
a Worker. Of these the Lays of France are merely paraphrases 
of Marie : great part of the Songs of a Worker is occupied with 
mere translation of modern French verses — poor work for a poet 
at all times. But The Epic of Women and Music and Moonlight 
contain stuff which it is not extravagant to call extraordinary. 

It was never widely popular, for O'Shaughnessy pushed the 
fancy of the Prse-Raphaelites for a dreamy remoteness to its very 
furthest, and the charge (usually an uncritical one, but usually 
also explaining with a certain justice a poet's unpopularity) of 
"lack of human interest" was brought against him. Sometimes, 
too, either of deliberate conviction or through corrupt following 
of others, he indulged in expressions of opinion about matters on 
which the poet is not called upon to express any, in a manner 
which was always unnecessary and sometimes offensive. But 
judged as a poet he has the unum necessarium, the individual 
note of song. Like Keats, he was not quite individual — there 
are echoes, especially of Edgar Poe, in him. But the genuine 
and authentic contribution is sufficient, and is of the most 
unmistakable kind. In the first book "Exile," "A Neglected 
Heart," " Bisclavaret," "The Fountain of Tears," "Barcarolle," 
make a new mixture of the fair and strange in meaning, a new 
valuation of the eternal possibilities of language in sound. Music 
and Moonlight — O'Shaughnessy was one of the few poets who 
have been devoted to music — is almost more remote, and even 
less popularly beautiful ; but the opening " Ode," some of the 
lyrics in the title poem (such as " Once in a hundred years "), 
the song " Has summer come without the rose," and not a few 
others, renew for those who can receive it the strange attraction, 
the attraction most happily hinted by the very title of this book 
itself, which O'Shaughnessy could exercise. That there was not a 
little that is morbid in him — as perhaps in the school generally — 
sane criticism cannot deny. But though it is as unwise as it is 



296 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD chap. 

unsafe to prefer morbidness for itself or to give it too great way, 
there are undoubted charms in it, and O'Shaughnessy could give 
poetical form to these as few others could. Two of his own 

lines — 

Oh ! exquisite malady of the soul, 

How hast thou marred me — 

put the thing well. Those who have once tasted his poetry 
return, and probably, though they are never likely to be 
numerous, always when they have once tasted will return, to 
the visions and the melodies — 

Of a dreamer who slumbers, 
And a singer who sings no more. 

Another poet whose death brings him within our range, and 
who may be said to belong, with some striking differences of cir- 
cumstance as well as individual genius, to the same school, 
was James Thomson, second of the name in English poetry, 
but a curious and melancholy contrast to that Epicurean ani- 
mal, the poet of The Seasons. He was born at Port-Glasgow 
on 23rd November 1834, and was the son of a sailor. His 
parents being in poor circumstances, he obtained, as a child, a 
place in the Royal Caledonian Asylum, and, after a good educa- 
tion there, became an army schoolmaster — a post which he held 
for a considerable time. But Thomson's natural character was 
recalcitrant to discipline and distinguished by a morbid social 
jealousy. He gradually, under the influence of, or at any rate in 
company with, the notorious Charles Bradlaugh, adopted atheistic 
and republican opinions, and in 1862 an act of insubordination 
led to his dismissal from the army, for which he had long lost, if 
he ever had, any liking. It is also said that the death of a girl to 
whom he was passionately attached had much to do with the 
development of the morbid pessimism by which he became dis- 
tinguished. For some time Thomson tried various occupations, 
being by turns a lawyer's clerk, a mining agent, and war corre- 
spondent of a newspaper with the Carlists. But even before he 



JAMES THOMSON 297 



left the army he had, partly with Mr. Bradlaugh's help, obtained 
work on the press, and such income as he had during the last 
twenty years of his life was chiefly derived from it. He might 
undoubtedly have made a comfortable living in this way, for his 
abilities were great and his knowledge not small. But in addition 
to the specially poetical weakness of disliking "collar-work," he 
was hampered by the same intractable and morose temper which 
he had shown in the army, by the violence of his religious and 
political views, and lastly and most fatally by an increasing slav- 
ery to drink and chloral. At last, in 1882, he — after having 
been for some time in the very worst health — burst a blood- 
vessel while visiting his friend the blind poet Philip Bourke 
Marston, and died in University College Hospital on 3rd June. 
This melancholy story is to be found sufficiently reflected in 
his works. Those in prose, though not contemptible, neither de- 
serve nor are likely to receive long remembrance, being for the 
most part critical studies, animated by a real love for literature 
and informed by respectable knowledge, but of necessity lacking 
in strict scholarship, distinguished by more acuteness than wis- 
dom, and marred by the sectarian violence and narrowness of 
a small anti-orthodox clique. They may perhaps be not unfairly 
compared to the work of a clever but ill-conditioned schoolboy. 
The verse is very different. He began to write it early, and it 
chiefly appeared in Mr. Bradlaugh's National Reformer with the 
signature " B. V.," the initials of " Bysshe Vanolis," a rather char- 
acteristic nom de guerre which Thomson had taken to express 
his admiration for Shelley directly, and for Novalis by anagram. 
Some of it, however, emerged into a wider hearing, and attracted 
the favourable attention of men like Kingsley and Froude. But 
Thomson did nothing of importance till 1874, when "The City of 
Dreadful Night " appeared in the National Reformer, to the no 
small bewilderment probably of its readers. Six years later the 
poem was printed with others in a volume, quickly followed by a 
second, Fane's Story, etc. Thomson's melancholy death attracted 
fresh attention to him, and much — perhaps a good deal too much 



298 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD chap. 

— of his writings has been republished since. His claims, how- 
ever, must rest on a comparatively small body of work, which will 
no doubt one day be selected and issued alone. "The City of 
Dreadful Night" itself, incomparably the best of the longer poems, 
is a pessimist and nihilist effusion of the deepest gloom amount- 
ing to despair, but couched in stately verse of an absolute sin- 
cerity and containing some splendid passages. With this is 
connected one of the latest pieces, the terrible " Insomnia." Of 
lighter strain, written when the poet could still be happy, are 
" Sunday at Hampstead " and " Sunday up the River," " The 
Naked Goddess," and one or two others ; while other things, such 
as " The fire that filled my heart of old," must also be cited. 
Even against these the charge of a monotonous, narrow, and irra- 
tional misery has been brought. But what saves Thomson is 
the perfection with which he expresses the negative and hopeless 
side of the sense of mystery, of the Unseen; just as Miss Rossetti 
expresses the positive and hopeful one. No two contemporary 
poets perhaps ever completed each other in a more curious way 
than this Bohemian atheist and this devout lady. 

So far in this chapter the story of poetry, from Tennyson 
downwards, has been conducted in regular fashion, and by citing 
the principal names which represent the chief schools or sub- 
schools. But we must now return to notice a very considerable 
company of other verse-writers, without mention of whom this 
history would be wofully incomplete. Nor must it by any means 
be supposed that they are to be regarded invariably as constituting 
a " second class." On the contrary, some of them are the equals, 
one or two the superiors, of Thomson or of O'Shaughnessy. But 
they have been postponed, either because they belong to schools 
of which the poets already mentioned are masters, to choruses of 
which others are the leaders, or because they show rather blended 
influences than a distinct and direct advance in the main poetical 
line of development. Others again rank here, and not earlier, 
because they are of the second class, or a lower one. 

Of these, though he leaves a name certain to live in English 



M. F. TUPPER 299 



literary history, if not perhaps quite in the way in which its author 
wished, is Martin Farquhar Tupper, who was born, in 1 810, of a 
very respectable family in the Channel Islands, his. father being a 
surgeon of eminence. Tupper was educated at the Charterhouse 
and at Christ Church, and was called to the bar. But he gave 
himself up to literature, especially poetry or verse, of which he 
wrote an enormous quantity. His most famous book appeared 
originally in 1839, though it was afterwards continued. It was 
called Proverbial Philosophy, and criticised life in rhythmical rather 
than metrical lines, with a great deal of orthodoxy. Almost from 
the first the critics and the wits waged unceasing war against it ; 
but the public, at least for many years, bought it with avidity, and 
perhaps read it, so that it went through forty editions and is said 
to have brought in twenty thousand pounds. Nor is it at all 
certain that any genuine conception of its pretentious triviality 
had much to do with the decay which, after many years, it, like 
other human things, experienced. Mr. Tupper, who did not die 
till 1889, is understood to have been privately an amiable and 
rather accomplished person ; and some of his innumerable minor 
copies of verse attain a very fair standard of minor poetry. But 
Proverbial Philosophy remains as one of the bright and shining 
examples of the absolute want of connection between literary 
merit and popular success. 

It has been said that Lord Tennyson's first work appeared in 
Poems by Two Brothers, and it is now known that this book was 
actually by the three, — Frederick, Charles, and Alfred. Frederick, 
the eldest, who, at a great age, is still alive, has never ceased 
verse-writing. Charles, who afterwards took the name of Turner, 
and, having been born in 1808, died in 1879, was particularly 
famous as a sonneteer, producing in this form many good and 
some excellent examples. Arthur Hallam, whom In Memoriam 
has made immortal, was credited by the partial judgment of his 
friends with talents which, they would fain think, were actually 
shown both in verse and prose. A wiser criticism will content 
itself with saying that in one sense he produced In Memoriam 



300 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD chap. 

itself, and that this is enough connection with literature for any 
man. His own work has a suspicious absence of faults, without 
the presence of any great positive merit, — a combination almost 
certainly indicating precocity, to be followed by sterility. But 
this consummation he was spared. John Sterling, who has been 
already referred to, and who stands to Carlyle in what may be 
called a prose version of the relation between Tennyson and 
Hallam, wrote some verse which is at least interesting ; and Sir 
Francis Doyle, also elsewhere mentioned, belongs to the brood of 
the remarkable years 1807-14, having been born in 18 10. But 
his splendid war-songs were written not very early in life. 

Of the years just mentioned, the first, 1807, contributed, 
besides Mr. Frederick Tennyson, the very considerable talent 
of Archbishop Trench, a Harrow and Trinity (Cambridge) man 
who had an actual part in the expedition to Spain from which 
Sterling retreated, took orders, and ended a series of ecclesiastical 
promotions by the Archbishopric of Dublin, to which he was con- 
secrated in 1864, which he held with great dignity and address 
during the extremely trying period of Disestablishment, and which 
he resigned in 1884, dying two years later. Trench wrote always 
well, and always as a scholar, on a wide range of subjects. He 
was an interesting philologist, — his Study of Words being the most 
popular of scholarly and the most scholarly of popular works on 
the subject, — a valuable introducer of the exquisite sacred Latin 
poetry of the Middle Ages to Englishmen, a sound divine in 
preaching and teaching. His original English verse was chiefly 
written before the middle of the century, though perhaps his best 
known (not his best) verses are on the Battle of the Alma. He 
was a good sonneteer and an excellent hymn-writer. 

1809 contributed three writers of curiously contrasted character. 
One was Professor Blackie, an eccentric and amiable man, a 
translator of yEschylus, and a writer of songs of a healthy and 
spirited kind. The second, Dr. Thomas Gordon Hake, a poet 
of Parables, has never been popular, and perhaps seldom arrived 
at that point of projection in which poetical alchemy finally and 



vi HAKE — LORD HOUGHTON 301 

successfully transmutes the rebel materials of thought and phrase 
into manifest gold ; but he had very high and distinctly rare 
poetical qualities. Such things as "Old Souls," "The Snake 
Charmer," "The Palmist," three capital examples of his work, 
are often, and not quite wrongly, objected to in different forms of 
some such a phrase as this : " Poetry that is perfect poetry ought 
never to subject any tolerable intellect to the necessity of search- 
ing for its meaning. It is not necessary that it should yield up 
the whole treasures of that meaning at once, but it must carry on 
the face of it such a competent quantity as will relieve the reader 
from postponing the poetic enjoyment in order to solve the 
intellectual riddle." The truth of this in the main, and the 
demurrers and exceptions to it in part, are pretty clear ; nor is 
this the place to state them at length. It is sufficient to say that 
in Dr. Hake's verse, especially that part of it published between 
1870 and 1880 under the titles Madeline, Parables and Tales, 
New Symbols, Legends of the Morrow and Maiden Ecstasy, the 
reader of some poetical experience will seldom fail to find satis- 
faction. 

It is impossible to imagine a greater contrast than that of this 
poet with Lord Houghton, earlier known to everybody as Richard 
Monckton Milnes, who died in 1885. He was of the golden 
age of Trinity during this century, the age of Tennyson, and 
throughout life he had an amiable fancy for making the acquaint- 
ance of everybody who made any name in literature, and of many 
who made none. A practical and active politician, and a constant 
figure in society, he was also a very considerable man of letters. 
His critical work ( principally but not wholly collected in Monographs*) 
is not great in bulk but is exceedingly good, both in substance 
and in style. His verse, on the other hand, which was chiefly the 
produce of the years before he came to middle life, is a little slight, 
and perhaps appears slighter than it really is. Few poets have 
ever been more successful with songs for music : the " Brookside " 
(commonly called from its refrain, " The beating of my own 
heart"), the famous and really fine "Strangers Yet," are the best 



302 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD chap. 

known, but there are many others. Lord Houghton undoubtedly 
had no strong vein of poetry. But it was always an entire mistake 
to represent him as either a fribble or a sentimentalist, while with 
more inducements to write he would probably have been one of 
the very best critics of his age. 

It is necessary once more to approach the unsatisfactory brevity 
of a catalogue in order to mention, since it would be wrong to omit, 
Sir Samuel Ferguson (1810-86), an Irish writer who produced 
some pleasant and spirited work of ordinary kinds, and laboured 
very hard to achieve that often tried but seldom achieved adventure, 
the rendering into English poetry of Irish Celtic legends and 
literature j Alfred Domett (181 1-87), author of the New Zealand 
epic of Ranulf and Amohia and much other verse, but most 
safely grappled to English poetry as Browning's " Waring " ; 
W. B. Scott (1812-90), an outlying member of the Prae-Raphael- 
ite School in art and letters, in whom for the most part 
execution lagged behind conception both with pen and pencil ; 
Charles Mackay (1814-89), an active journalist who wrote a vast 
deal in verse and prose, his best things perhaps being the mid- 
century " Cholera Chant," the once well-known song of " A good 
time coming," and in a sentimental strain the piece called 
" O, ye Tears " ; and Mrs. Archer Clive, the author of the re- 
markable novel of Paul Ferroll, whose IX. Poems by V. attracted 
much attention from competent critics in the doubtful time of 
poetry about the middle of the century, and are really 
good. 

Not many writers, either in prose or poetry, give the impression 
of never having done what was in them more than William Edmons- 
toune Aytoun, who was born in 1813 and died in 1865. He was a 
son-in-law of " Christopher North," and like him a pillar of Black- 
wood 's Magazine, in which some of his best things in prose and verse 
appeared. He divided himself between law and literature, and in 
his rather short life rose to a Professorship in the latter and a 
Sheriffdom in the former, deserving the credit of admirably stimu- 
lating influence in the first capacity and competent performance 



vi AYTOUN 303 

in the second. He published poems when he was only seventeen. 
But his best work consists of the famous Bon Gaultier Ballads — a 
collection of parodies and light poems of all kinds written in 
conjunction with Sir Theodore Martin, and one of the pleasantest 
books of the kind that the century has seen — and the more serious 
Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, both dating from the forties, the 
satirically curious Firmilian (see below), 185 4, and some Blackwood 
stories of which the very best perhaps is The Glcnmutchkin 
Railway. His long poem of Bothwell, 1855, and his novel of 
Norman Sinclair, 1861, are less successful. 

The Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, on which his chief serious 
claim must rest, is an interesting book, if hardly a great one. 
The style is modelled with extreme closeness upon that of Scott, 
which even Sir Walter, with all his originality and genius, had not 
been able always to preserve from flatness. In Aytoun's hands 
the flats are too frequent, though they are relieved and broken at 
times by really splendid bursts, the best of which perhaps are 
"The Island of the Scots " and "The Heart of the Bruce." For 
Aytoun's poetic vein, except in the lighter kinds, was of no very 
great strength ; and an ardent patriotism, a genuine and gallant 
devotion to the Tory cause, and a keen appreciation of the 
chivalrous and romantic, did not always suffice to supply the want 
of actual inspiration. 

If it had been true, as is commonly said, that the before- 
mentioned Firmilian killed the so-called Spasmodic School, 
Aytoun's failure to attain the upper regions of poetry would have 
been a just judgment ; for the persons whom he satirised, though 
less clever and humorous, were undoubtedly more poetical than 
himself. But nothing is ever killed in this way, and as a matter 
of fact the Spasmodic School of the early fifties was little more 
than one of the periodical outbursts of poetic velleity, more 
genuine than vigorous and more audacious than organic, which 
are constantly witnessed. It is, as usual, not very easy to find out 
who were the supposed scholars in this school. Mr. P. H. Bailey, 
the author of Festus, who still survives, is sometimes classed with 



304 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD chap. 

them ; but the chief members are admitted to have been Sydney 
Dobell and Alexander Smith, both remarkable persons, both failures 
of something which might in each case have been a considerable 
poet, and both illustrating the " second middle " period of the 
poetry of the century which corresponds to that illustrated earlier 
by Darley, Home, and Beddoes. 

Of this pair, Sydney Dobell had some, and Alexander Smith 
had others, of the excuses which charity not divorced from 
critical judgment makes for imperfect poets. Dobell, with suffi- 
cient leisure for poetical production, had a rather unfortunate edu- 
cation and exceedingly bad health. Smith had something of both 
of these, and the necessity of writing for bread as well. Dobell, 
the elder of the two, and the longer lived, though both died com- 
paratively young, was a Kentish man, born at Cranbrook on 5 th 
April 1824. When he was of age his father established himself 
as a wine-merchant at Cheltenham, and Sydney afterwards exer- 
cised the same not unpoetical trade. He went to no school and 
to no University, privations especially dangerous to a person 
inclined as he was to a kind of passionate priggishness. He was 
always ill ; and his wife, to whom he engaged himself while a boy, 
and whom he married before he had ceased to be one, was always 
ill likewise. He travelled a good deal, with results more beneficial 
to his poetry than to his health ; and, the latter becoming ever 
worse, he died near Cheltenham on 22nd August 1874. His first 
work, an " Italomaniac " closet drama entitled The Roman, was 
published in 1850; his second, Balder, in 1853. This latter has 
been compared to Ibsen's Brand: I do not know whether any 
one has noticed other odd, though slight, resemblances between 
Peer Gynt and Beddoes' chief work. The Crimean War had a 
strong influence on Dobell, and besides joining Smith in Sonnets 
on the War (1855), he wrote by himself England in Time of War, 
next year. He did not publish anything else ; but his works 
were edited shortly after his death by Professor Nichol. 

Alexander Smith, like so many of the modem poets of Scot- 
land, was born in quite humble life, and had not even the full 



ALEXANDER SMITH 



305 



advantages open to a Scottish "lad o' pairts." His birthplace, 
however, was Kilmarnock, a place not alien to the Muses ; and 
before he was twenty-one (his birth year is diversely given as 1829 
and 1830) the Rev. George Gilfillan, an amiable and fluent critic 
of the middle of the century, who loved literature very much and 
praised its practitioners with more zeal than discrimination, pro- 
cured the publication of the Life Drama. It sold enormously ; it 
is necessary to have been acquainted with those who were young 
at the time of its appearance to believe in the enthusiasm with 
which it was received ; but a little intelligence and a very little 
goodwill will enable the critic to understand, if not to share their 
raptures. For a time Smith was deliberately pitted against Tenny- 
son by " the younger sort " as Dennis says of the faction for Settle 
against Dryden in his days at Cambridge. The reaction which, 
mercifully for the chances of literature if not quite pleasantly for 
the poet, always comes in such cases, was pretty rapid, and Smith, 
ridiculed in Firmilian, was more seriously taxed with crudity (which 
was just), plagiarism (which was absurd), and want of measure 
(which, like the crudity, can hardly be denied) . Smith, however, 
was not by any means a weakling except physically; he could 
even satirise himself sensibly and good-humouredly enough ; and 
his popularity had the solid result of giving him a post in the 
University of Edinburgh — not lucrative and by no means a sine- 
cure, but not too uncongenial, and allowing him a chance both to 
read and to write. For some time he stuck to poetry, publishing 
City Poems in 1857 and Edwin of Deira in 1861. But the taste 
for his wares had dwindled : perhaps his own poetic impulse, a 
true but not very strong one, was waning ; and he turned to prose, 
in which he produced a story or two and some pleasant descrip- 
tive work — Dreamthorpe (1863), and A Summer in Skye (1865). 
Consumption showed itself, and he died on 8th January 1867. 

It has already been said that there is much less of a distinct 
brotherhood in Dobell and Smith, or of any membership of a 
larger but special "Spasmodic school," than of the well-known 
and superficially varying but generally kindred spirit of periods 



3 o6 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD chap. 

and persons in which and in whom poetic yearning does not find 
organs or opportunities thoroughly suited to satisfy itself. Dobell 
is the more unequal, but the better of the two in snatches. His 
two most frequently quoted things — "Tommy's Dead" and the 
untitled ballad where the refrain — 

Oh, Keith of Ravelston, 

The sorrows of thy line]! 

occurs at irregular intervals — are for once fair samples of their 
author's genius. "Tommy's dead," the lament of a father over 
his son, is too long, it has frequent flatnesses, repetitions that do 
not add to the effect, bits of mere gush, trivialities. The tragic 
and echoing magnificence of the Ravelston refrain is not quite 
seconded by the text : both to a certain extent deserve the epi- 
thet (which I have repudiated for Beddoes in another place) of 
" artificial." And yet both have the fragmentary, not to be ana- 
lysed, almost uncanny charm and grandeur which have been spoken 
of in that place. Nor do this charm, this grandeur, fail to reappear 
(always more or less closely accompanied by the faults just men- 
tioned, and also by a kind of flatulent rant which is worse than 
any of them) both in Dobell's war-songs, which may be said in a 
way to hand the torch on from Campbell to Mr. Kipling, and in 
his marvellously unequal blank verse, where the most excellent 
thought and phrase alternate with sheer balderdash — a pun which 
(it need hardly be said) was not spared by contemporary critics 
to the author of Balder. 

Alexander Smith never rises to the heights nor strikes the dis- 
tinct notes of Dobell ; but the Life Drama is really on the whole 
better than either Balder or The Roman, and is full of what may 
be called, from opposite points of view, happy thoughts and quaint 
conceits, expressed in a stamp of verse certainly not quite origi- 
nal, but melodious always, and sometimes very striking. He has 
not yet had his critical resurrection, and perhaps none such will 
ever exalt him to a very high prominent position. He seems to 
suffer from the operation of that mysterious but very real law 



MINOR POETS 307 



which decrees that undeserved popularity shall be followed by 
neglect sometimes even more undeserved. But when he does 
finally find his level, it will not be a very low one. 

To the Spasmodics may be appended yet another list of bards 
who can claim here but the notice of a sentence or a clause, 
though by no means uninteresting to the student, and often very 
interesting indeed to the student-lover of poetry : — the two Joneses 
— Ernest (1819-69), a rather silly victim of Chartism, for which 
he went to prison, but a generous person and master of a pretty 
twitter enough ; and Ebenezer (1820-60), a London clerk, author 
of Studies of Sensation and Event, a rather curious link between 
the Cockney school of the beginning of the century and some 
minor poets of our own times, but overpraised by his rediscoverers 
some years ago ; W. C. Bennett, a popular song-writer ; William 
Cory ( -1892), earlier and better known as Johnson, an Eton 
master, a scholar, an admirable writer of prose and in Ionica of 
verse slightly effeminate but with a note in it not unworthy of 
one glance of its punning title; W. C. Roscoe (1823-59), grand- 
son of the historian, a minor poet in the best sense of the term ; 
William Allingham (1824-89), sometime editor of Eraser, and a 
writer of verse from whom at one time something might have been 
expected; Thomas Woolner, a sculptor of great, and — in My 
Beautiful Lady, Pygmalion, etc. — a poet of estimable merit, whose 
first-named volume attracted rather disproportionate praise at its 
first appearance. As one thinks of the work of these and others — 
often enjoyable, sometimes admirable, and long ago or later ad- 
mired and enjoyed — the unceremoniousness of despatching them 
so slightly brings a twinge of shame. But it is impossible to do 
justice to their work, or to the lyrics, merry or sensuous, of 
Mortimer Collins, who was nearly a real poet of vers de soeiete, and 
had a capital satiric and a winning romantic touch ; the stirring 
ballads of Walter Thornbury (which, however, would hardly have 
been written but for Macaulay on the one hand and Barham on 
the other) and the ill-conditioned but clever Radical railing of 
Robert Brough at " Gentlemen." But if they cannot be discussed, 



3 o8 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD chap. 

they shall at least be mentioned. On three others, Frederick 
Locker, Arthur Hugh Clough, and "Owen Meredith" (Lord 
Lytton), we must dwell longer. 

Clough has been called by persons of distinction a " bad 
poet " ; but this was only a joke, and, with all respect to those who 
made it, a rather bad joke. The author of " Qua Cursum Ventus," 
of the marvellous picture of the advancing tide in " Say not the 
struggle," and of not a few other things, was certainly no bad 
poet, though it would not be uncritical to call him a thin one. 
He was born at Liverpool on New Year's Day 1819, spent part of 
his childhood in America, went to Rugby very young and dis- 
tinguished himself there greatly, though it may be doubted whether 
the peculiar system which Arnold had just brought into full play 
was the healthiest for a self-conscious and rather morbid nature 
like dough's. From Rugby he went to Balliol, and was entirely 
upset, not, as is sometimes most unjustly said, by Newman, but by 
the influence of W. G. Ward, a genial Puck of Theology, who, 
himself caring for nothing but mathematics, philosophy, and play- 
acting, disturbed the consciences of others by metaphysical 
quibbles, and then took refuge in the Church of Rome. Clough, 
who had been elected to an Oriel fellowship, threw it up in 1848, 
turned freethinker, and became the head of an educational in- 
stitution in London called University Hall. He did not hold this 
very long, receiving a post in the Education Office, which he held 
in various forms till his death in 1861 at Florence. 

It is not necessary to be biassed by Matthew Arnold's 
musical epicede of " Thyrsis " in order to admit, nor should 
any bias against his theological views and his rather rest- 
less character be sufficient to induce any one to deny, a distinct 
vein of poetry in Clough. His earliest and most popular con- 
siderable work, The Bothie of Tober-na- Vuolich (the title of which 
was originally rather different, is written in hexameters which do 
not, like Kingsley's, escape the curse of that "pestilent heresy" ; 
and the later Amours de Voyage and Dipsychus, though there are 
fine passages in both, bring him very close to the Spasmodic school, 



CLOUGH — LOCKER 309 



of which in fact he was an unattached and more cultivated member, 
with fancies directed rather to religiosity than to strict literature. 
Ambarvalia had preceded the Bothie, and other things followed. 
On the whole, Clough is one of the most unsatisfactory products of 
that well-known form of nineteenth century scepticism which has 
neither the strength to believe nor the courage to disbelieve " and 
have done with it." He hankers and looks back, his "two souls " 
are always warring with each other, and though the clash and con- 
flict sometimes bring out fine things (as in the two pieces above 
cited and the still finer poem at Naples with the refrain " Christ 
is not risen"), though his "Latest Decalogue" has satirical merit, 
and some of his country poems, written without undercurrent of 
thought, are fresh and genial, he is on the whole a failure. But 
he is a failure of a considerable poet, and some fragments of suc- 
cess chequer him. 

Frederick Locker, who on his second marriage took the 
additional name of Lampson, was born in 182 1 of a family long 
connected with the Navy and with Greenwich Hospital. He 
himself held for some years a post in the Admiralty ; but he was 
much more addicted to society and to literature than to official 
work. His first marriage with Lady Charlotte Bruce strengthened 
his social position, and his second gave him wealth. He published, 
as early as 1857, a volume of light verse entitled London Lyrics, 
which, with the work of Prior, Praed, and Mr. Austin Dobson, 
stands at the head of its kind in English. But — an exceedingly 
rare thing for amateur as well as for professional writers in our 
time — he was not tempted either by profit or fame to write 
copiously. He added during his not short life, which closed in 
May 1895, a few more poems to London Lyrics. He edited in 
1867 an anthology of his own kind of verse called Lyra Elegan- 
tiarum, and in 1879 he produced a miscellany of verse and prose, 
original and selected, called Patchwork, in which some have seen 
his most accomplished and characteristic production. In form it 
is something like Southey's Omniana, partly a commonplace book, 
partly full of original things ; but the extracts are so choicely 



310 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD chap. 

made and the original part is so delightful that it is not quite like 
any book in the language. If Charles Lamb had been of Mr. 
Locker's time and circumstances he might have made its fellow. 
" My Guardian Angel," a short prose anecdote, is, as nearly as the 
present writer knows, unique. Latterly its author was chiefly 
known as a man of much hospitality and a collector of choice 
books. He would not do anything bad, and apparently he did 
not feel inclined to do anything good. And as this is a century 
when almost everybody must still be doing, and taking the chance 
of goodness and badness, such an exception to the rule should 
meet with honour. 

No poet of the period, perhaps none of the century, occupies a 
position less settled by general criticism, or more difficult to settle, 
than that of Edward Robert, first Earl of Lytton, for a long time 
known in poetry as " Owen Meredith." The only son of the 
novelist, he was born on 8th November 1831, and after going 
to Harrow, but not to either university, entered the diplomatic 
service at the age of eighteen. In this he filled a great many 
different offices at a great many different places for nearly thirty 
years, till, after succeeding to his father's title, he was made First 
Minister at Lisbon, and then in 1876 Viceroy of India. This 
post he gave up in 1880, and after the return of the Tory party 
to power, was sent in 1887 as Ambassador to Paris, where he 
was very popular, and where he died in 1892. 

Despite the fact that his time, save for the interval of 1880-87, 
was thus uninterruptedly occupied with business, Lord Lytton 
was an indefatigable writer of verse ; while in The Ring of 
Amasis he tried the prose romance. His chief poetical books 
were Clytemnestra (1855) ; The Wanderer (1859), which contains 
some charming lyrical work; Lucile (i860), a verse story; Songs 
of Servia {Serb ski Pesme) (1861) ; Orval, or the Fool of Time 
and Chronicles and Characters (1869) ; Fables in Song (1874) ; 
Glenaveril, a very long modern epic (1885) ; and After Paradise, 
or Legends of Exile (1887). Besides these he collaborated in 
1 86 1 with his friend Julian Fane in a poem, Tannhauser, which, 



vi THE EARL OF LYTTON 311 

though too much of a Tennysonian echo, has good passages ; and 
after his death two volumes equal if not superior to anything he 
had done, Marah, a collection of short poems, and King Poppy, 
a fantastic epic, were published. This extensive and not always 
easily accessible work is conveniently represented by two volumes 
of selections, one representing chiefly the earlier and shorter works, 
edited by Miss Betham-Edwards in 1890, the other drawn mostly 
from the later and longer, edited by his daughter, Lady Betty 
Balfour, in 1894. This latter was accompanied by reprints of The 
Wanderer and Lucile. 

The difficulties in criticism above referred to arise, not merely 
from the voluminousness of this work, nor from the fact that Lord 
Lytton shares with all the poets of his special generation, except 
Rossetti, that inability to hit upon a definite and distinct manner 
of his own which is so frequently and strangely remarkable in 
what may be called intermediate poetical periods. Indeed in 
his later years he did strike out something like a very distinct 
style. But he suffers more than any other poet of anything like 
his gifts from two faults, one of which is perhaps the fault that 
hurts a poet most with the vulgar, and the other that which does 
him most harm with critics. He was so frankly pleased with, 
and so apt at imitating the work of his great contemporaries, 
that he would publish things to which fools gave the name of 
plagiarisms — when they were in fact studies in the manner of 
Tennyson, Heine, Browning, and others. And in the second 
place, though he frequently rewrote, it seemed impossible for him 
to retrench and concentrate. To this may be added his fondness 
for extremely long narrative poems, the taste for which has cer- 
tainly gone out, while it may be doubted whether, unless they are 
pure romances of adventure, they are ever good things. 

The consequence of all this, and perhaps of other things less 
legitimately literary, such as political partnership, has hitherto 
been that Lord Lytton has been ranked very far indeed below 
his proper place. For he had two poetical gifts, the higher of 
them in a high, the lower in an eminent degree. The first was 



3 ! 2 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD chap. 

the gift of true lyric, not seldom indeed marred by the lack of 
polish above noticed, but real, true, and constant, from the 
" Fata Morgana " and " Buried Heart " of The Wanderer to 
the " Experientia Docet " and " Selenites " of Marah, more than 
thirty years later. The other was a much more individual power, 
and by some might be ranked higher. It is the gift of what can 
best generally be called ironical narration, using irony in its 
proper sense of covert suggestive speech. This took various 
forms, indicated with more or less clearness in the very titles 
of Chronicles and Characters and Fables in Song, — symbolic- 
mystical in Legends of Exile (where not only some of the legends 
but the poems called "Uriel" and "Strangers" are among the 
best things of the author and highly typical of his later manner), 
and fantastically romantic, with a strong touch of symbolism, in 
King Poppy. And when, as happens in most of the pieces men- 
tioned above and many others, the combination welds itself into 
a kind of passionate allegory, few poets show a better power of 
transporting the reader in the due poetic manner. There can be no 
doubt that if Lord Lytton had developed this faculty somewhat 
earlier (there are traces of it very early), had made its exercises 
rather more clear and direct, and had subjected their expression 
to severer thinning and compression, he would have made a great 
reputation as a poet. As it is, it cannot be denied that he had 
the positive faculties of poetry in kind and degree only inferior 
to those possessed by at most four or five of his English con- 
temporaries from Tennyson downwards. 

Nor should there perhaps lack mention of Roden Noel and 
Thomas Ashe, two writers in whom, from their earlier work, it 
was not unreasonable to expect poets of a distinct kind, and 
who, though they never improved on this early work, can never 
be said exactly to have declined from it. The first and elder 
was a son of the Earl of Gainsborough, was born in 1834, went 
to Cambridge, travelled a good deal, and at various times, till 
his death . at the age of sixty, published much verse and not a 
little prose, both showing a distinctly poetical imagination without 



MINOR POETS 313 



a sufficient organ of expression. Nor did he ever develop this 
except in A Little Child's Monument, where the passionate 
personal agony injures as much as it helps the poetical result. 
Mr. Ashe, who was born in 1836, and died in 1889, also a 
Cambridge man, had a much less ambitious and rather less 
interesting but somewhat better-organised talent for verse, and 
his Sorrows of Hypsipyle, published in 1866, caused and author- 
ised at the time considerable expectations from him. But his 
vein was rather the result of classical culture working on a slight 
original talent than anything better, and he did not rise beyond 
a pleasant competence in verse which was never that of a 
poetaster, but hardly ever that of a distinct poet. In which 
respect he may appear here as the representative of no scanty 
company dead and living. For even the longest chapter of a 
book must have an end ; and it is impossible to find room in it 
for the discussion of the question, whether the friends of Oliver 
Madox Brown, son of the famous Prse-Raphaelite painter, were 
or were not wrong in seeing extraordinary promise in his boyish 
work; whether the sonnets of Ernest Lefroy (1855-91) were 
exercises or works of art. A few more remarks on humorous 
poets and women-poets must close the record. 

In the art of merely or mainly humorous singing two names, 
those of Edward Lear and Charles Stuart Calverley, entirely domi- 
nate the rest among dead writers in the last part of the century. 
Lear, a good deal the elder man of the two, was born in 18 13, 
was a painter by profession, and was the " E. L." of a well-known 
poem of Tennyson's. It was not till 1861 that his delightful 
nonsense-verses, known to his friends in private, were first 
published, and they received various additions at intervals till 
his death in 1888. The sheer nonsense-verse — the amphigoiiri 
as the French call it — has been tried in various countries and at 
various times, but never with such success as in England, and it 
has seldom, if ever, been cultivated in England with such success 
as by Lear. His happy concoction of fantastic names, the easy 
slipping flow of his verse, and above all, the irresistible parody 



3 14 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD chap. 

of sense and pathos that he contrived to instil into his rigmarole 
are unapproachable. In a new and not in the least opprobrious 
sense he was " within the realms of Nonsense absolute." 

Calverley attempted less " uttermost isles " of- fun. Born in 
1 83 1 of an excellent Yorkshire family, he was educated at 
Harrow, and — a thing as rare in the nineteenth as common in 
the seventeenth century — at both universities, gaining at both a 
great reputation for scholarship, eccentricity, and bodily strength. 
After some time he married and began to work at the Bar ; but 
an accident on the ice in 1867 brought on concussion of the 
brain, though he lingered in constantly weakening health till 
1884. His Verses and Translations twenty- two years earlier had 
made him the model of all literary undergraduates with a turn for 
humour ; and he was able in spite of his affliction to issue some 
things later, the chief being Fly Leaves in 1872. Calverley, as 
has been said, was a scholar, and his versions both from and 
into the classical languages would of themselves have given him 
a reputation ; but his forte lay partly in the easier vein of parody, 
wherein few excelled him, partly in the more difficult one of 
original light verse, wherein he had a turn (as in his famous 
eulogy on tobacco) quite his own. He has never been equalled 
in this, or even approached, except by James Kenneth Stephen 
(1859-92), whose premature death deprived his friends of a 
most amiable personality, and literature, in all probability, of a 
considerable ornament. As it was, "J. K. S." left next to 
nothing but two tiny collections of verse, showing an inspiration 
midway between Calverley and Praed, but with quite sufficient 
personal note. 

Two other writers of less scholarly style, but belonging to 
the London Bohemian school of the third quarter of the 
century, W. J. Prowse, "Nicholas" (1836-70), and H. S. 
Leigh (1837-83), may be noticed. Prowse, whose career was 
very short, was the author of the charming lines on " The 
beautiful City of Prague," which have been attributed to 
others : while Leigh's Carols of Cockayne (he was also a play- 



MINOR POETS 315 



wright) vary the note of Hood happily, and now and then with a 
real originality. 

Except Miss Rossetti, no woman during this time approached 
the poetical excellence of Mrs. Barrett Browning. But the 
whole period has been unprecedentedly fertile in poetesses, 
and whereas we had but five or six to mention in the earlier 
chapter devoted to verse, we have here at least a dozen, though 
no one who requires very extended notice here. Lady Dufferin 
(1807-186 7), mother of the well-known diplomatist, a member of 
the Sheridan family, and her sister, and junior by a year, Mrs. 
Norton (1808-1876), were both writers of facile and elegant verse, 
with the Irish note of easy melody. The former was the less 
known to the general reader, though a few of her pieces, such as 
" The Irish Emigrant " and " Katie's Letter," have always been 
favourite numbers for recitation. Mrs. Norton at one time 
enjoyed a considerable reputation as a poetess by contributions 
to "Annuals " and " Souvenirs," chiefly in the sentimental ballad 
style which pleased the second quarter of the century. " The 
Outward Bound," " Bingen on the Rhine," and other things are 
at least passable, and one of the author's latest and most ambitious 
poems, The Lady of La Garaye, has a sustained respectability. 
To a few fanatical admirers the scanty verse of Emily Bronte 
has seemed worthy of such high praise that only mass of work 
would appear to be wanting to put her in the first rank of 
poetesses if not of poets. Part of this, however, it is to be feared, 
is due to admiration of the supposed freedom of thought in her 
celebrated " Last Lines," which either in sincerity or bravado 
pronounce that "vain are the thousand creeds," and declare for 
a sort of vague Pantheism, immanent at once in self and the 
world. At thirty, however, a genuine poetess should have pro- 
duced more than a mere handful of verse, and its best things 
should be independent of polemical partisanship either for or 
against orthodoxy. As a matter of fact, her exquisite " Remem- 
brance," and the slightly rhetorical but brave and swinging 
epigram of "The Old Stoic," give her better claims than the 



316 THE SECOND POETICAL PERIOD chap, vi 

"Last Lines," and with them and a few others place her as a 
remarkable though not by any means a supreme figure. 

The more prudent admirers of Marian Evans (George Eliot), 
who wrote a good deal of verse, either admit that her verse was 
not poetry, or hold up a much-quoted passage, " Oh, may I 
join the choir invisible," which, like the far superior piece just 
referred to, is only a hymn on the side which generally dispenses 
with hymns ; and not a very good one, though couched in fair 
Wordsworthian blank verse. They would no doubt indulge in 
derisive scorn at the idea of the mild muse of Adelaide Anne 
Procter, daughter of " Barry Cornwall," receiving praise denied 
to Miss Bronte and Miss Evans ; and it must be admitted that 
Miss Procter never did anything so good as " Remembrance." On 
the other hand, she was quite free from the " sawdust " and 
heaviness which mar George Eliot's verse. Her style was akin 
to that which has been noticed in speaking of Mrs. Norton, 
though of a somewhat later fashion, and like those of her father, 
her songs, especially the famous " Message," had the knack of 
suiting composers. Menella Bute Stedley and Dora Greenwell, 
a respectable pair, somewhat older than Miss Procter (she was 
born in 1825 and died in 1S64), considerably outlived her, Miss 
Stedley 's life lasting from 1820 to 1877, and Miss Greenwell's 
from 182 1 to 1882. Both were invalids, and soothed their cares 
with verse, the latter to the better effect, though both in no 
despicable strain. Augusta Webster (1840-94) and Emily 
Pfeiffer ( -1890) were later poetesses of the same kind, but 
lower rank, though both were greatly praised by certain critics. 
Sarah Williams, a short-lived writer of some sweetness (1841-68), 
commended herself chiefly to those who enjoy verse religious 
but "broad"; Constance Naden to those who like pessimist 
agnosticism ; Amy Levy to those who can deplore a sad fate and 
admire notes few and not soaring, but passionate and genuine. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE NOVEL SINCE 1850 

Certain novelists who were mentioned at the end of chapter iii., 
though they all lived far into the last half of the century, not only 
belonged essentially to its first division, but strictly speaking fell 
out of strict chronological arrangement of any kind, being of the 
class of more or less eccentric men of genius who may appear at 
any time and belong to none in particular; and certain others 
of the earlier time, less eccentric, lived on far towards our own. 
About 1850 however, a little before or a little after it, there 
appeared a group of novelists of great talent, and in some cases 
of genius itself, who were less self-centred, and exemplified to a 
greater degree the special tendencies of the time. These ten- 
dencies were variously connected with the Oxford or Tractarian 
Movement ; the transfer of political power from the upper 
to the middle classes by the first Reform Bill ; the rise of what 
is for shortness called Science ; the greater esteem accorded to 
and the more general practice of what is, again for shortness, 
called Art ; the extension in a certain sense of education ; the re- 
engagement of England, long severed from continental politics, in 
those politics by the Crimean war ; the enormous development of 
commerce by the use of steam navigation and of railways ; the 
opening up of Australia and its neighbourhood ; the change 
effected in the East by the removal, gradual for some time, then 
rapid and complete after the Indian Mutiny, of the power of the 
East India Company ; and the " Liberal " movement generally. 

3i7 



3i 8 THE NOVEL SINCE 1850 chap. 

To work and counterwork out the influence of these various 
causes on separate authors, and the connection of the authors 
with the causes, would take a volume in itself. But on the scale 
and within the limits possible here, the names of Charlotte 
Bronte, Marian Evans (commonly called George Eliot), Charles 
Kingsley, Anthony Trollope, and Charles Reade will give us such 
central points as can be most safely utilised. Another, Miss 
Charlotte Yonge, the chief practitioner of the religious novel, was 
contemporary with almost the earliest of these, but falls out of 
this book as still living. 

The members of this group were, as happens with a repeated 
coincidence in literary history too distinct to be altogether 
neglected, born within a very few years of each other : Reade 
in 1 81 4, Trollope in 1815, Miss Bronte next year, Kingsley 
and Miss Evans in 1819 ; but as generally happens likewise, their 
appearance as authors, or at least as novelists, did not follow in 
exact sequel. The first-renowned, the shortest-lived, and though 
by no means the most brilliant or powerful, in a certain way the 
freshest and most independent, was Charlotte Bronte, the daughter 
of a Yorkshire clergyman of eccentric and not altogether amiable 
character and of Irish blood. She was born on 21st April 18 16. 
The origin of the Brontes or Pruntys has, as well as their family 
history generally, been discussed with the curiously disproportion- 
ate minuteness characteristic of our time ; but hardly anything 
need be said of the results of the investigation, except that they 
were undoubtedly Irish. Charlotte's mother died soon after the 
Rev. Patrick Bronte had received the living of Haworth, and 
Charlotte herself was sent to school at a place called Cowan's 
Bridge, her experiences at which have in the same way been the 
subject of endless inquiry into the infinitely little, in connection 
with the " Lowood " of Jane Eyre. After two of her sisters had 
died, and she herself had been very ill, she was taken away and 
educated partly at home, partly elsewhere. Her two surviving 
sisters, who were her juniors, Emily by two years and Anne by four, 
were both of more or less literary leanings, and as they were all 



MISS BRONTE 319 



intended to be governesses, the sole profession for poor gentle- 
women in the middle of the century, Emily and Charlotte were 
sent to Brussels to qualify. In 1846 the three published a joint 
volume of Poems under the pseudonyms (which kept their initials) 
of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, and to people over middle age 
Charlotte Bronte is still perhaps most familiar as Currer Bell. 
Emily's poems are elsewhere commented upon. The eldest and 
youngest sister had no poetical vocation, and Anne had not much 
for prose. But she, like the others, attempted it after the failure 
of their verse in a triad of novels, The Professor, by Charlotte ; 
Wuthering Heights (very much praised by those who look first 
for unconventionally and force), by Emily, who followed it with 
The Tenant of Wildfett Hall ; and Agnes Grey, by Anne. But 
Charlotte could not get The Professor published — indeed it 
is anything but a good book — and set to work at the famous 
Jane Eyre, which after being freely refused by publishers, was 
accepted by Messrs. Smith and Elder and published in 1847, 
with the result of violent attacks and very considerable popularity. 
Death the next year and the year after robbed her of both her 
sisters and of her brother Patrick, a ne'er-do-weel, who, on the 
strength of his Bohemianism and his sisters, is sometimes 
supposed to have had genius. Shirley appeared in 1S49, and 
Villette in 1852. In 1854 Charlotte married her father's curate, 
Mr. Nicholls, but died next year, on 31st March 1855. 

Perhaps the most interesting way of looking at Charlotte 
Bronte, who, as has been said, has been violently attacked, and who 
has also been extravagantly praised (though not so extravagantly as 
her sister Emily), is to look at her in the light of a precursor or 
transition-novelist, representing the time when the followers of 
Scott had wearied the public with second-rate romances, when 
Thackeray had not arisen, or had only just arisen, and when the 
modern domestic novel in its various kinds, from the religious to 
the problematic, was for the most part in embryo, or in very 
early stages. This latter novel she in fact anticipated in 
many of its kinds, and partly to the fact of this anticipation, 



320 THE NOVEL SINCE 1850 chap. 

partly to the vividness which her representation of personal 
experiences gave to her work, may the popularity which it at first 
had, and such of it as has survived, be assigned. In this latter 
point, however, lay danger as well as safety. It seems very im- 
probable that if Charlotte Bronte had lived, and if she had 
continued to write, her stock of experiences would have sufficed 
her ; and it would not appear that she had much else. She is 
indeed credited with inventing the " ugly hero " in the Mr. 
Rochester of Jane Eyre, but in the long-run ugliness palls almost 
as much as beauty, perhaps sooner. Except in touches probably 
due to suggestions from Emily, the "weirdness" of the younger 
sister was not exhibited by the elder. The more melodramatic 
parts of the book would not have borne repetition, and its main 
appeal now lies in the Lowood scenes and the character of Jane 
herself, which are both admittedly autobiographical. So also 
Shirley is her sister Emily, the curates who pester her appear to 
have been almost in case to enter libel actions if they thought 
proper, and Villette is little more than an embroidered version of 
the Brussels sojourn. How successful an appeal of this kind is, 
the experience of Byron and many others has shown ; how 
dangerous it is, could not be better shown than by the same 
experience. It was Charlotte Bronte's good fortune that she died 
before she had utterly exhausted her vein, though those who fail 
to regard Paul Emanuel with the affection which he seems to 
inspire in some, may think that she went perilously near it. 
But fate was kind to her : some interesting biographies and 
brilliant essays at different periods have revived and championed 
her fame : and her books — at least fane Eyre almost as a whole and 
parts of the others — will always be simply interesting to the novel- 
reader, and interesting in a more indirect fashion to the critic. 
For this last will perceive that, thin and crude as they are, they 
are original, they belong to their own present and future, not to 
their past, and that so they hold in the history of literature a 
greater place than many books of greater accomplishment which 
are simply worked on already projected and accepted lines. 



GEORGE ELIOT 321 



Emily's work, though too small in bulk and too limited in char- 
acter to be put really high, has this original character in intense 
equality. 

The mantle of Charlotte Bronte fell almost directly from her 
shoulders on those of another novelist of her sex. The author of 
Jane Eyre died, as has been said, in the spring of 1855. In the 
autumn of the next year was written, and in the January issue of 
Blackwood's Magazine for 1857 appeared, the first of a series 
of Scenes of Clerical Life. The author, then and for some time 
afterwards unknown, was Mary Ann or Marian Evans, who took 
various styles during her life, but wrote habitually under the nom 
de guerre of " George Eliot." Miss Bronte had not been a very 
precocious novelist ; but Miss Evans did not begin to write novels 
till she was nearly as old as Miss Bronte was when she died. Her 
time, however, had been by no means wasted. Born on 22nd 
November 181 9, at Arbury in Warwickshire, where her father 
was land-steward to Mr. Newdigate, she moved, after twenty 
years' life in the country or at school, with her father into Cov- 
entry, and became acquainted with a set of Unitarians who had 
practically broken all connection with Christianity. She accepted 
their opinions with the curious docility and reflexiveness which, 
strong as was her mind in a way, always distinguished her ; and 
as a sign of profession she undertook the translation of Strauss' 
Leben Jesu. In 1849 sne went abroad, and stayed for some time 
at Geneva, studying hard, and not returning to England till next 
year. Then establishing herself in London, she began to write 
for the Westminster Review, which she helped to edit, and trans- 
lated Feuerbach's Wesen des Christenthums. It is highly prob- 
able that she would never have been known except as an essayist 
and translator, if she had not formed an irregular union with 
George Henry Lewes, a very clever and versatile journalist, who 
was almost a philosopher, almost a man of science, and perhaps 
quite a man of letters of the less creative kind. Under his in- 
fluence (he had been a novelist himself, though an unsuccessful 
one, and was an excellent critic) the docility above remarked on 



322 THE NOVEL SINCE 1850 chap. 

turned itself into the channel of novel-writing, with immediate 
and amazing success. 

Some good judges have thought that Miss Evans never ex- 
ceeded, in her own special way, the Scenes of Clerical Life. But 
it was far exceeded in popularity by Adam Bede, which, oddly 
enough, was claimed by or at least for an impostor after its tri- 
umphant appearance in 1858. The position of the author may 
be said to have been finally established by The Mill on the Floss 
(i860), though the opening part of Silas Marner (1861) is at 
least equal if not superior to anything she ever did. Her later 
works were Romola, a story of the Italian Renaissance (1863); 
Felix Holt, the Radical (1866); some poems (the Spanish Gypsy, 
Jubal, etc., 1868-74); Middlemarch (1871); and Daniel De- 
ronda (1876). This last was followed by a volume of essays en- 
titled the Impressions of Theophrastiis Such. Mr. Lewes having 
died in 1878, Miss Evans, in May 1880, married Mr. John Cross, 
and died herself in December of the same year. Her Life and 
Letters were subsequently published by her husband, but the let- 
ters proved extremely disappointing to her admirers, and the life 
was not very illuminative, except as to that docility and capacity 
for taking colour and pressure from surroundings which have been 
noticed above. 

As a poet George Eliot has been noticed elsewhere. She merely 
put some of the thoughtful commonplaces of her time and school 
into wooden verse, occasionally grandiose but never grand, and 
her purple passages have the purple of plush not of velvet. Nor 
is she very remarkable as an essayist, though some of her early 
articles have merit, and though Theophrastiis Such, appearing at 
a time when her general hold on the public was loosening, not 
commending itself in form to her special admirers, and injured 
in parts by the astonishing pseudo-scientific jargon which she had 
acquired, was received rather more coldly than it deserved. But 
as a novelist she is worthy of careful attention. Between i860 
and 1870, a decade in which Thackeray passed away early and 
during which Dickens did no first-class work, she had some 



GEORGE ELIOT 323 



claims to be regarded as the chief English novelist who had given 
much and from whom more was to be expected ; after Dickens' 
death probably four critics out of five would have given her the 
place of greatest English novelist without hesitation. Neverthe- 
less, even from the first there were dissidents : while at the 
time of the issue of Middlemarch her fame was at the very 
highest, the publication of Daniel Deronda made it fall rapidly ; 
and a considerable reaction (perhaps to be reversed, perhaps not) 
has set in against her since her death. 

The analysis of George Eliot's genius is indeed exceedingly 
curious. There are in her two currents or characters which are more 
or less mingled in all her books, but of which the one dominates in 
those up to and including Silas Marner, while the other is chiefly 
noticeable in those from Ro?nola onward. The first, the more 
characteristic and infinitely the more healthy and happy, is a quite 
extraordinary faculty of humorous observation and presentation 
of the small facts and oddities of (especially provincial) life. The 
Scenes of Clerical Life show this strongly, together with a fund of 
untheatrical pathos which scarcely appears in so genuine a form 
afterwards. In Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss it combines 
with a somewhat less successful vein of tragedy to make two 
admirable, if not faultless, novels ; it lends a wonderful charm 
to the slight and simple study of Silas Marner. But, abundant 
as it is, it would seem that this is observation, not invention, nor 
that happiest blending of observation and invention which we 
find in Shakespeare and Scott. The accumulated experiences of 
her long and passive youth were now poured out with a fortunate 
result. But in default of invention, and in presence of the 
scientific or pseudo-scientific spirit which was partly natural to her 
and partly imbibed from those who surrounded her, she began, 
after Silas Marner, to draw always in part and sometimes mainly 
upon quite different storehouses. It is probable that the selec- 
tion of the Italian Renaissance subject of Romola was a very 
disastrous one. She herself said that she " was a young woman 
when she began the book and an old one when she finished it." 



3 2 4 THE NOVEL SINCE 1850 chap. 

It is a very remarkable tour de force, but it is a tour de force 
executed entirely against the grain. It is not alive : it is a work 
of erudition not of genius, of painful manufacture not of joyous 
creation or even observation. And this note of labour deepened 
and became more obvious even when she returned to modern 
and English subjects, by reason of the increased "purpose" 
which marked her later works. It has been noted by all critics 
of any perception as extremely piquant, though not to careful 
students of life and letters at all surprising, that George Eliot, 
whose history was always well known, is in almost every one 
of her books the advocate of the strictest union of love and 
marriage — no love without marriage and no marriage without 
love. But she was not satisfied with defending this thesis, 
beneficial, comparatively simple, and, in the situations which it 
suggests, not unfriendly to art. In her last book, Daniel Deronda, 
she embarked on a scheme, equally hopeless and gratuitous, of 
endeavouring to enlist the public sympathies in certain visions of 
neo-Judaism. In all these books indeed, even in Deronda, the 
old faculty of racy presentation of the humours of life recurred. 
But it became fainter and less frequent ; and it was latterly 
obscured, as has been hinted, by a most portentous jargon 
borrowed from the not very admirable lingo of the philosophers 
and men of science of the last half of the nineteenth century. 
All these things together made the later books conspicuously, 
what even the earlier had been to some extent, lifeless structures. 
They were constructed no doubt with much art and of material 
not seldom precious, but they were not lively growths, and they 
were fatally tinged with evanescent " forms in chalk," fancies of 
the day and hour, not less ephemeral for being grave in subject 
and seeming, and almost more jejune or even disgusting to 
posterity on that account. 

Almost as much of the time, though curiously different in the 
aspect of it which he represented, was Charles Kingsley, who was 
born in the same year as George Eliot, on the 18th of June 1819. 
A fanciful critic might indulge in a contrast between the sober 



vil CHARLES KINGSLEY , 325 

though not exactly dull scenery of the Midlands which saw her 
birth, and that of the most beautiful part of Devonshire (Holne, 
on the south-eastern fringe of Dartmoor) where, at the vicarage 
which his father held, Kingsley was born. He was educated at 
King's College, London, and Magdalene College, Cambridge, took 
a very good degree, and very soon after his appointment to the 
curacy of Eversley, in Hampshire, became rector thereof in 1844. 
He held the living for the rest of his life, dying there on the 23rd 
January 1875. It was not, however, by any means his only pre- 
ferment. In i860 he was made Professor of Modern History 
at Cambridge, not the most fortunate of appointments ; for, with 
a tendency to small slips in fact at least equal to that of his 
friend and brother-in-law Mr. Froude, Kingsley, though capable 
of presenting separate aspects and facets of the past admirably, 
had not the general historic grasp which redeemed Froude. Nine 
years later he resigned the post and was made a Canon of Chester, 
while in 1873 this was exchanged for a Canonry at Westminster 
and a Chaplaincy to the Queen. Otherwise Kingsley's private life 
was happy and uneventful, its chief incident being a voyage to 
the West Indies (which, though unvisited, he had long before 
so brilliantly described) in 1871. 

His literary work was very large, much varied, and of an 
excellence almost more varied than its kinds. He began, of 
course, with verse, and his Sainfs Tragedy (1848), a drama on 
the story of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, was followed by shorter 
poems (far too few) at different times, most of them previous to 
1858, though the later books contain some charming fragments, 
and some appeared posthumously. Of all men who have written 
so little verse during as long a life in our time, Kingsley is prob- 
ably the best poet. The Sainfs Tragedy is a little "viewy" 
and fluent. But in Andromeda he has written the very best 
English hexameters ever produced, and perhaps the only ones 
in which that alien or rebel takes on at least the semblance of 
a loyal subject to the English tongue. The rise of the breeze 
after the passage of the Nereids, the expostulation of Andromeda 



326 THE NOVEL SINCE 1850 chap. 

with Perseus, and the approach of the monster, are simply admir- 
able. "The Last Buccaneer" and "The Red King" — call them 
" Wardour Street," as some critics may — are among the best of 
their kind; and scores of songs, snatches, etc., from "The Three 
Fishers " and " The Starlings " of a very early date to the " When 
all the world is young " ballad of the Water Babies and the post- 
humous fragment in rhyme of" Lorraine, Lorraine, Lorree " — one of 
the triumphs of that pure poetry which has the mimimum of mean- 
ing, yet enough — are of extraordinary vigour, freshness, and charm. 
But Kingsley was one of those darlings — perhaps the rarest — 
of the Muses to whom they grant the gift not only of doing a little 
poetry exquisitely, but the further gift of abstaining from doing 
anything ill ; and he seems to have recognised almost at once 
that " the other harmony," that of prose, was the one meant for 
him to do his day's work in. An enthusiast for the people, and 
an eager disciple of Carlyle, he produced in the fateful year 1849 
two novels, Alton Locke and Yeast, a little crude, immature, and 
violent, but of wonderful power and beauty as literature, and 
putting current ideas of Chartism, the Tractarian movement, the 
woes of the working classes, and what not, with that most 
uncommon touch which takes out of the expression all its ephem- 
erality. He had joined Maurice in the " Christian Socialist " 
movement, and was a frequent newspaper writer in the same sense 
as that of his novels ; while he soon began to contribute to Fraser's 
Magazine a series of extremely brilliant essays, since collected in 
various forms, on literature, scenery, sport (he was an ardent 
fisherman), and things in general. His next novel, Hypatia, is 
still shot with Christian Socialism, but is much less crude ; and a 
further sobering down without any loss of force appears in the 
great Elizabethan novel of Westward Ho! usually, and perhaps 
rightly, thought his masterpiece (1855). Two Years Ago (1857), 
the title of which refers to the Crimean War, is much more 
unequal, and exhibits signs of a certain declension, though to a 
level still very high. His last novel, Hereiuard the Wake (1866), 
was and is very variously judged. 



vii CHARLES KINGSLEY 327 

But even the poems, the essays, and the novels, do not 
by any means fill up the list of the results of Kingsley's 
activity. He was a constant, and at his best a very good, 
sermon-writer for publication. He produced in the first flush of 
the rage for seashore studies (1854) a very pleasant little book 
called Glaucus ; he collected some of his historical lectures in 
The Roman and the Teuton; and he wrote in 1863 the delightful 
nondescript of The Water Babies, part story, part satire, part 
Rabelaisian fatrasie, but almost all charming, and perhaps the 
latest book in which his powers appear at their very best. These 
powers, as exhibited in his novels, with a not dissimilar exhibition 
in little in his essays, are so remarkable that in certain senses 
Kingsley may, with a little kindness, be put in the very first class 
of English novelists, and might be put there by the sternest 
critical impartiality were it not for his concomitant defects. 
These defects are fairly numerous, and they are unfortunately of 
a kind not likely to escape attention. He was a rather violent, 
though a very generous partisan, and was perpetually going out 
of his way to provoke those on the other side by " flings " of this 
or that kind. He was extremely fond of arguing, but was a most 
poor and unhappy logician. One of the best known and most 
unfortunate episodes of his literary life was the controversy into 
which he plunged with Newman in 1864. Kingsley had before 
on various occasions spoken enthusiastically of Newman's genius 
and character : the reference to the peculiar estimate of truth held 
by some Roman Catholics, and approved, or supposed to be 
approved, by Newman, which was the text for the latter's wrath, 
was anything but offensive, and it afterwards became certain, 
through the publication of the Apologia, that the future Cardinal, 
with the inspiration of a born controversialist, had simply made 
Kingsley the handle for which he had been waiting. A very little 
dialectical skill would have brought Kingsley out of the contest 
with honours at least divided ; but, as it was, he played like a 
child into Newman's hands, and not only did much to re-establish 
that great man in public opinion, but subjected himself at the 



328 THE NOVEL SINCE 1850 chap. 

time, and to some extent since, to an obloquy at least as unjust 
as that which had rested upon Newman. This maladroitness 
appears constantly in the novels themselves, and it is accompanied 
not merely by the most curious and outrageous blunders in fact 
(such as that which represents Marlowe as dying in the time of 
James the First, not that of Elizabeth), but by odd lapses of taste 
in certain points, and in some (chiefly his later) books by a hap- 
hazard and inartistic construction. 

We must, of course, allow for these things, which are the more 
annoying in that they are simply a case of those which incuria 
fudit. But when they are allowed for, there will remain such a 
gallery of scenes, characters, and incidents, as few English novelists 
can show. The best passages of Kingsley's description, from 
Alton Locke to Hereward, are almost unequalled and certainly 
unsurpassed. The shadows of London low life and of working- 
class thought in Alton Locke, imitated with increasing energy for 
half a century, have never been quite reached, and are most 
brilliantly contrasted with the lighter Cambridge scenes. Yeast, 
perhaps the least general favourite among his books, and certainly 
the crudest, has a depth of passion and power, a life, an intensity, 
the tenth part of which would make the fortune of a novel now ; 
and the variety and brilliancy of Hypatia are equalled by its 
tragedy. Unequal as Two Years Ago is, and weak in parts, it 
still has admirable passages ; and Hereward to some extent recovers 
the strange panoramic and phantasmagoric charm of Hypatia. 
But where Westward Hoi deserves the preference, and where 
Kingsley vindicates his claim to be the author not merely of 
good passages but of a good book, is in the sustained passion of 
patriotism, the heroic height of adventure and chivalry, which 
pervades it from first to last. Few better historical novels have 
ever been written ; and though, with one exception, that of Salva- 
tion Yeo, the author has drawn better characters elsewhere, he 
has nowhere knitted his incidents into such a consistent whole, or 
worked characters and scenes together into such a genuine and 
thorough work of art. 



vii ANTHONY TROLLOPE 329 

Anthony Trollope, one of the most typical novelists of the 
century, or at least of the half-century, in England, if not one of 
the greatest, was a member of a literary family whose other 
members, of more or less distinction, may for convenience' sake 
best be mentioned here. Little is recorded of his father, who was, 
however, a barrister, and a Fellow of New College, Oxford. But 
Anthony's mother, the " Mrs. Trollope " of two generations ago, 
who was born a Miss Milton in 1780, was herself very well known 
in print, especially by her novel of The Widow Barnaby (1839), 
which had sequels, and by her very severe Domestic Manners of 
the Americans, which appeared in 1832, after she had qualified 
herself to write it by a three years' residence in the United States. 
She wrote a great deal at this period, and survived till 1863 ; but 
her work hardly survived as long as she did. It has, however, 
been said, and not without justice, that much of the more vivid 
if coarser substance of her younger son's humour is to be traced 
in it. The elder son, Thomas Adolphus, who was born in 18 10, 
and lived from 1841 for some half-century onwards in Italy, was 
also a prolific novelist, and wrote much on Italian history ; while 
perhaps his best work was to be found in some short pieces, com- 
bining history with a quasi-fictitious interest, which he contributed 
to the periodicals edited by Dickens. 

But neither mother nor elder brother could vie with Anthony, 
who was born in 1815, was educated at Winchester and Harrow, 
spent the greater part of his life as an official of the Post Office, 
and died in December 1882, leaving an enormous number of 
novels, which at one time were the most popular, or almost the 
most popular, of their day, and to which rather fastidious judges 
have found it difficult to refuse all but the highest praise. 
Almost immediately after Trollope's death appeared an Auto- 
biography in which, with praiseworthy but rather indiscreet 
frankness, he detailed habits of work of a mechanical kind, the 
confession of which played into the hands of those who had 
already begun to depreciate him as a mere book-maker. It is 
difficult to say how many novels he wrote, persevering as he did 



33Q THE NOVEL SINCE 1850 chap. 

in composition up to the very time of his death ; and it is certain 
that the productions of his last decade were, as a rule, very inferior 
to his best. This best is to be found chiefly, but not entirely, in 
what is called the " Barsetshire " series, clustering round a county 
and city which are more or less exactly Hampshire and Win- 
chester, beginning in 1855 with The Warden, a good but rather 
immature sketch, and continuing through Barchester Towers 
(perhaps his masterpiece), Doctor Thome, Framley Parsonage, 
and The Small House at Allington (the two latter among the early 
triumphs of the Cornhill Magazine), to The Last Chronicle of 
Barset (1867), which runs Barchester Towers very hard, if it does 
not surpass it. Other favourite books of his were The Three Clerks, 
Or ley Farm, Can You Forgive Her, and Phineas Finn — nor does 
this by any means exhaust the list even of his good books. 

It has been said that Trollope is a typical novelist, and the 
type is of sufficient importance to receive a little attention, even in 
space so jealously allotted as ours must be. The novel craved by 
and provided for the public of this second period (it has also 
been said) was a novel of more or less ordinary life, ranging from 
the lower middle to the upper class, correctly observed, diversified 
by sufficient incident not of an extravagant kind, and furnished 
with description and conversation not too epigrammatic but natural 
and fairly clever. This norm Trollope hit with surprising just- 
ness, and till the demand altered a little or his own hand failed 
(perhaps there was something of both) he continued to hit it. 
His interests and experiences were fairly wide ; for, besides being 
active in his Post Office duties at home and abroad, he was 
an enthusiastic fox-hunter, fairly fond of society and of club-life, 
ambitious enough at least to try other paths than those of fiction 
in his Thackeray (a failure), his Cicero (a worse failure), and other 
things. And everything that he saw he could turn into excellent 
novel-material. No one has touched him in depicting the 
humours of a public office, few in drawing those of cathedral cities 
and the hunting-field. If his stories, as stories, are not of 
enthralling interest or of very artfully constructed plots, their 



CHARLES READE 



craftsmanship in this respect leaves very little to complain of. 
And he can sometimes, as in the Stanhope family of Barchester 
Towers, in Mrs. Proudie passim, in Madalina Demolines, and in 
others, draw characters very little removed from those who live 
with us for ever. It is extremely improbable that there will ever 
be a much better workman of his own class ; and his books are 
certainly, at their best, far better than all but one or two that 
appear, not merely in any given year nowadays, but in any given 
lustrum. Yet the special kind of their excellence, the facts that 
they reflect their time without transcending it, and that in the 
way of merely reflective work each time prefers its own workmen 
and is never likely to find itself short of them, together with the 
great volume of Trollope's production, are certainly against him ; 
and it is hard even for those who enjoyed him most, and who can 
still enjoy him, to declare positively that there is enough of the 
permanent and immortal in him to justify the hope of a 
resurrection. 

In Charles Reade, on the other hand, there is undoubtedly 
something of this permanent or transcendent element, though 
less perhaps than some fervent admirers of his have claimed. He 
was born on June 1814 at Ipsden in Oxfordshire, where his family 
had been some time seated as squires. He had no public school 
education, but was elected first to a Demyship and then to a 
Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford. He was called to the 
Bar in 1842 ; but his Fellowship made him independent, and he 
pursued many crazes — he was one of the most eccentric of those 
English authors who are noticed in this volume — but no profession. 
He did not even begin to write very early, and when he did it 
was drama, not prose or fiction. He was not very successful with 
the stage, though he never quite gave it up. It was about 1852 
when he began to write, or at least to publish, novels ; and between 
the Teg Woffington of that year and his death on 1st April 1884 
he produced nearly a score, diversifying the publication with law- 
suits, eccentric newspaper correspondences, and other things. 
Indeed he has in more than one of his books introduced mental 



332 THE NOVEL SINCE 1850 chap. 

delusions with such startling subtlety and truth, and was so entirely 
odd in the ordinary relations of life, that some have not hesitated 
to insinuate a slight want of sanity. 

If there was any madness in him, the hackneyed alliance of 
great wits was certainly not refused. A novelist of violent likes 
and dislikes himself, he has found violent partisans and scornful 
pooh-poohers. Among the former there is perhaps hardly one of 
his chief books — the quaint and brilliant Peg Woffington, the 
pathetic Christie Johnstone, Hani Cash, Griffith Gaunt, Put 
Yourself in his Place, A Terrible Temptation, and the rest — which 
has not special sectaries. But catholic criticism would undoubtedly 
put 7/ is Never too Late to Mend (1856) and The Cloister and the 
Hearth (1861) at the head of all. The former is a tale of the 
moment, based chiefly on some stories which had got abroad of 
tyranny in gaols, and on the Australian gold fever of a few years 
earlier. The latter is a pure romance, purporting to tell the 
adventures of Erasmus' father in the fifteenth century. The 
contrast of these subjects illustrates admirably a curious combina- 
tion in Reade's genius which, for the matter of that, might be 
independently exemplified from either book. On the one side 
he was one of the earliest and one of the most industrious of those 
who have been called the " document " or " reporter " novelists — 
now collecting enormous stores of newspaper cuttings and busying 
himself with keenest interest in the things of the day ; now, as in 
The Cloister and the Hearth, not disdaining to impart realism 
and vividness to his pictures by adapting and almost translating 
whole passages from Erasmus' own Colloquies. On the other, he 
was a poetic seer and dreamer, of the strongest romantic force, 
and capable of extraordinary flights of power, passion, and pathos. 
But there was another thing that he was not, and that was a 
critic. His taste and judgment were extremely deficient ; he had 
no sense of general proportion in his work ; and was quite as 
likely to be melodramatic as to be tragical, to be coarse as to be 
strong, to be tedious as to be amusing, to be merely revolting as 
to purify by pity and terror. Both the books just specially 



vii WILKIE COLLINS — H. KINGSLEY 333 

mentioned may be thought too long : it is certain that The 
Cloister and the Hearth is. That a freshness still evident in 
Christie Johnstone has been lost in both (having been killed by 
"the document") is also true. But still, Reade undoubtedly 
had genius, and to genius most things can without much trouble 
be forgiven. 

The chief novelist of what is rather loosely called the School of 
Dickens, was Wilkie Collins, son of the painter of that name, who 
was born in London on 8th January 1824, and died in 1889. His 
greatest popularity was in the decade between 1857 and 1866, 
when The Dead Secret, The Woman in White, No Name, and 
Armadale, especially the second, had an immense vogue. Per- 
haps The Moonstone, which is later, is also better than any of 
these. The strictly literary merit of none could be put high, and 
the method, that of forwarding the result by a complicated in- 
tertwist of letters and narratives, though it took the public fancy 
for a time, was clumsy ; while the author followed his master in 
more than one aberration of taste and sentiment. His brother 
Charles Collins, who had a much shorter life, had a much more 
delicate style and fancy ; and the Cruise upon Wheels, a record 
of an actual tour slightly embellished and thrown into fictitious 
form, is one of the books which have, and are not, unless they 
drop entirely out of sight, likely to lose, a firm following of 
friends, few perhaps but faithful. Mortimer Collins, a contempo- 
rary, but no relation of these, whose poems have already been 
mentioned, was born in 1827 and died in 1876, the last twenty 
years of his life having been occupied by various and voluminous 
literary work. He was one of the last of the so-called Bohemian 
school in letters and journalism, something of a scholar, a fertile 
novelist, and a versatile journalist in most of the kinds which 
make up modern journalism. 

Henry Kingsley, younger brother of Charles, was himself a pro- 
lific and vigorous novelist ; and though a recent attempt to put him 
above his brother cannot possibly be allowed by sound criticism, 
he had perhaps a more various command of fiction, certainly a 



334 THE NOVEL SINCE 1850 



truer humour, and if a less passionate, perhaps a more thoroughly 
healthy literary temperament. But his life was not long, and he 
was unfortunately compelled during most of it to write for a living. 
Born in 1830, he was educated at King's College, London, and 
Worcester College, Oxford, on leaving which latter he went to 
Australia and lived there for five years. Returning in 1859, he 
wrote the admirable Australian story of Geoffrey Hamlyn, which, 
with Ravenshoe two years later, contains most of his work that can 
be called really first rate. He returned to Australia for his subject 
in The Hillyars and the Burtons, and wrote several other novels 
before his death in 1876, having been during part of the time a 
newspaper editor, a newspaper correspondent, and a journalist gen- 
erally. The absence of composition, which Flaubert deplored in 
English novels generally, shows at its height in Henry Kingsley, 
whose Ravenshoe, for instance, has scarcely any plot at all, and 
certainly owes nothing to what it has ; while he was a rapid and 
careless writer. But he had, in a somewhat less elaborate form, 
all his brother's talents for description of scene and action, and 
his characters, if more in the way of ordinary life, are also truer 
to that life. Also he is particularly to be commended for having, 
without the slightest strait-lacedness, and indeed with a good deal 
of positive Bohemianism, exhibited the nineteenth century English 
notion of what constitutes a gentleman perhaps better than any one 
else. "There are some things a fellow can't do" — the chance 
utterance of his not ungenerous scamp Lord Welter — is a mem- 
orable sentence, whereon a great sermon might be preached. 

A little older than Henry Kingsley (he died in the same year), 
much more popular for a time, and the exerter of an influence 
which has not ceased yet, and has been on the whole distinctly 
undervalued, was George Henry Lawrence, who was educated at 
Rugby and Balliol, was called to the Bar, but was generally known 
in his own time as Major Lawrence from a militia commission 
which he held. He also fought in, or at least was present dur- 
ing, the war of independence of the southern states of America. 
Lawrence, who was born in 1827, published in his thirtieth year 



vii LAWRENCE — MRS. GASKELL 335 

a novel, Guy Livingstone, which was very popular, and much 
denounced as the Gospel of" muscular blackguardism" — a parody 
on the phrase " muscular Christianity," which had been applied to 
and not unwelcomed by Charles Kingsley. The book exhibited 
a very curious blend of divers of the motives and interests which 
have been specified as actuating the novel about this time. 
Lawrence, who was really a scholar, felt to the full the Prae-Rapha- 
elite influence in art, though by no means in religion, and wrote in a 
style which is a sort of transition between the excessive floridness 
of the first Lord Lytton and the later Corinthianism of Mr. 
Symonds. But he retained also from his prototype, and new mod- 
elled, 'the tendency to take " society" and the manners', especially 
the amatory manners, of society very much as his province. And 
thus he rather shocked the moralists, not only in Guy Livingstone 
itself, but in its successors Sword and Gown, Barren Honour, 
Sans Merci, etc. That Lawrence's total ideal, both in style and 
sentiment, was artificial, false, and flawed, may be admitted. But 
he has to a great extent been made to bear the blame of exaggera- 
tions of his own scheme by others ; and he was really a novelist 
and a writer of great talent, which somehow came short, but not 
so very far short, of genius. 

Mrs. Gaskell was older than most of those hitherto mentioned 
in this chapter, having been born in 1810 ; but she did not begin 
to write very early. Mary Barton, her first and nearly her best 
book, appeared in 1848, and its vivid picture of Manchester life, 
assisted by its great pathos, naturally attracted attention at that 
particular time. Cranford (1853), in a very different style, some- 
thing like a blend of Miss Mitford and Miss Austen, has been the 
most permanently popular of her works. Ruth, of the same year, 
shocked precisians (which it need not have done), but is of much 
less literary value than Mary Barton or Cranford. Mrs. Gaskell, 
who was the biographer of Charlotte Bronte, produced novels 
regularly till her death in 1865, and never wrote anything bad, 
though it may be doubted whether anything but Cranford will 
retain permanent rank. 



336 THE NOVEL SINCE 1850 chap. 

The year 1857, which saw Guy Livingstone, saw a book as 
different as possible in ideal, but also one of no common merit, in 
John Halifax, Gentleman. The author of this was Dinah Maria 
Mulock, who afterwards became Mrs. Craik. She was born at 
Stoke-upon-Trent in 1826, and had written for nearly ten years 
when John Halifax appeared. She died in 1888, having written 
a very great deal both in prose and verse ; the former part including 
many novels, of which the best perhaps is A Life for a Life. Mrs. 
Craik was an example of the influence, so often noticed and to be 
noticed in the latter part of our period, of the great demand for 
books on writers of any popularity. Her work was never bad ; 
but it was to a very great extent work which was, as the French 
say, the " small change " for what would probably in other circum- 
stances have been a very much smaller quantity of much better 
work. How this state of things — which has been brought about 
on the one hand by the printing press, newspapers, and the spread 
of education, on the other by the disuse of sinecures, patronage, 
pensions, and easy living generally — is to be prevented from 
affecting literature very disastrously is not clear. Its negative or 
rather privative effect cannot but be bad ; if its positive effect is 
always as good as the works of Mrs. Craik, it will be fortunate. 

It is difficult, in a book of this kind, to know how far to attempt 
the subdivisions of specialist novels which have been common, 
such as for instance the sporting novel, the practitioners of which 
have been innumerable. The chief perhaps were Robert Surtees, 
the author of the facetious series of which " Mr. Jorrocks " is the 
central and best figure, and Major Whyte-Melville. The former, 
about the middle of the century, carried out with much knowledge, 
not inconsiderable wit, and the advantage of admirable illustrations 
from the pencil of John Leech, something like the original idea 
of Pickwick as a sporting romance, and there is a strong follow- 
ing of Dickens in him. Major Whyte-Melville, born near St. 
Andrews in 1821 and heir to property there, was educated at 
Eton, served for some years in the Guards, and with the Turkish 
Contingent in the Crimean War, and was killed in the hunting- 



MINOR NOVELISTS 337 



field in 1878. He touched various styles, chiefly those of Lever 
and Buhver, while he had a sort of contact with George Lawrence. 
He was never happier than in depicting his favourite pastime, 
which figures in most of his novels and inspired him with some 
capital verse. But in Holmby House, Sarchedon, the Gladiators, 
etc., he tried the historical style also. 

Nor must the brief life, embittered by physical suffering, but 
productive of not a little very cheerful work, of Francis Edward 
Smedley, a relation of the poetess mentioned in the last chapter, 
be forgotten. He, born in 181 8, went to Cambridge, and then 
became a novelist and journalist, dying in 1864. His best work 
belongs to exactly the period with which this chapter begins, the 
early fifties, and had the advantage, like other novels of the time, of 
illustration by " Phiz." The three chief books are Frank Fairleigh 
(1850), Lewis Arundel (1852), and Harry Coverdale's Courtship 
(1854). With a touch of Bulvverian romance, something of the sport- 
ing novel, and a good deal of the adventure story, Smedley united 
plenty of pleasant humour and occasionally not a little real wit. 

It will have been observed that more than one of the more 
distinguished novelists of this time attempted, and that at least 
one of them achieved, the historical novel ; nor was it at all likely 
that a kind so attractive in itself, illustrated by such remarkable 
genius, and discovered at last after many centuries of futile 
endeavour, should immediately or entirely lose its popularity. 
Yet it is certain that for about a quarter of a century, from 1845 
to 1870, not merely the historical novel, but the romance generally, 
did lose general practice and general attention, while, though 
about the latter date at least one novel of brilliant quality, Mr. 
Blackmore's Lorna Doone, vindicated romance, and historical 
romance, it was still something of an exception. Those who are 
old enough, and who paid sufficient attention to contemporary 
criticism, will remember that for many years the advent of a his- 
torical novel was greeted in reviews with a note not exactly of 
contempt, but of the sort of surprise with which men greet some- 
thing out of the way and old fashioned. 



33« THE NOVEL SINCE 1850 chap. 

This was the inevitable result of that popularity of the domestic 
and usual novel which this chapter has hitherto described, and it 
was as natural and as inevitable that the domestic and usual novel 
should in its turn undergo the same law. Not that this, again, 
was summarily, much less finally displaced ; on the contrary, the 
enormous and ever-increasing demand for fiction — which the 
establishment of public free libraries, and the custom of printing 
in cheaper form for sale, has encouraged pari passu with the 
apparent discouragement given to it by the fall of circulating 
libraries from the absolutely paramount place which they occupied 
not long ago — maintained the call for this as for other kinds of 
story. But partly mere love of change, partly the observations 
of those critics who were not content to follow the fashion merely, 
and partly also the familiar but inexplicable rise at the same 
time of divers persons whose talent inclined in a new direction, 
brought in, about 1SS0 or later, a demand for romance, for his- 
torical romance, and for the short story — three things against 
which the taste of the circulating-library reader during the genera- 
tion then expiring had distinctly set itself. The greater part of 
the results of this change falls out of our subject ; but one remark- 
able name, perhaps the most remarkable of all, is given to us by 
the Fates. 

For one of the pillars of this new building of romance was 
only too soon removed. Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson (more 
commonly known to the public by the first two, and to his friends 
by the second of his Christian names) belonged to the famous 
family of lighthouse architects who so long carried on the tradi- 
tions of Smeaton in that department of engineering ; and he was 
to have been an engineer himself. But he was incurably literary ; 
and after school and college at Edinburgh, was called to the Bar, 
with no more practical results in that profession than in the other. 
Born on 13th November 1850, he was not extremely precocious 
in publication ; and it was not till nearly the end of the seventies 
that his essays in the Cornhill Magazine and his stories in a 
periodical called London, short lived and not widely circulated, but 



STEVENSON 339 



noteworthy in its way, attracted attention. He followed them up 
with two volumes of somewhat Sternian travel, An Inland Voyage 
(1878) and Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879); next 
collecting his Corn/till Essays in two other volumes, Virginibus 
Puerisque (1881) and Familiar Studies of Men and Books (1882), 
and his London stories in The New Arabian Nights (1882). But 
he did not get hold of the public till a year later than the latest of 
these dates, with his famous Treasure Island, the best boys' story 
since Marryat, and one of a literary excellence to which Marryat 
could make no pretensions. The vein of romance which he then 
struck, and the older and more fanciful one of The New Arabian 
Nights, were followed up alternately or together in an almost annual 
succession of books — Prince Otto (1885), The Strange Case of Dr. 
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Kidnapped (1886), The Black Arrow 
(a wonderfully good, though not very generally popular, York-and- 
Lancaster story) (1888), The Master of Balhi7itrce (1889), the 
exquisite Catriona (1893). It also pleased him to write, in col- 
laboration with others, The Dynamiter, The Wrecker, The Ebb 
Tide, etc., where the tracing of the several shares is not unamusing. 
Stevenson also attempted poetry, and his Child's Garden of Verse 
(1885) has very warm admirers, who are often more doubtful about 
Underwoods (1887) and Ballads (1891). The list of his work is 
not exhausted, and one of the latest additions to it was A Foottiote 
to History (1892), containing an account of the intestine troubles 
of the island of Samoa, where Mr. Stevenson, long a victim to 
lung disease, latterly fixed his abode, and where he died suddenly 
in the winter of 1894. 

As has been the case with most of the distinguished writers 
of recent years, Mr. Stevenson has been praised by some of his 
contemporaries and juniors with an uncritical fervour which has 
naturally provoked depreciation from others ; and the charm of 
his personality was so great that it is extremely difficult for any 
one who knew him to hold the scales quite even. As the most 
brilliant and interesting by far, however, of those English writers 
whose life was comprised in the last half of the century he 



34Q THE NOVEL SINCE 1850 chap. 

absolutely demands critical treatment here, and it so happens that 
his method and results were extremely typical of the literary move- 
ment and character of our time. He has left somewhat minute 
accounts of his own apprenticeship, but they are almost unneces- 
sary : no critic of the slightest competence could fail to divine the 
facts. Adopting to the full, and something more than the full, the 
modern doctrine of the all-importance of art, of manner, of style 
in literature, Mr. Stevenson early made the most elaborate studies 
in imitative composition. There is no doubt that he at last 
succeeded in acquiring a style which was quite his own : but it 
was complained, and with justice, that even to the last he never 
attained complete ease in this style ; that its mannerism was not 
only excessive, but bore, as even excessive mannerism by no means 
always does, the marks of distinct and obvious effort. This was 
perhaps most noticeable in his essays, which were further marred 
by the fact that much of them was occupied by criticism, for 
which, though his taste was original and delicate, Stevenson's 
knowledge was not quite solid enough, and his range of sympathies 
a little deficient in width. In his stories, on the other hand, the 
devil's advocate detected certain weak points, the chief of them 
being an incapacity to finish, and either a distaste or an incapacity 
for introducing women. This last charge was finally refuted by 
Catriona, not merely in the heroine, but in the much more charm- 
ing and lifelike figure of Barbara Grant ; but the other was some- 
thing of a true bill to the last. It was Stevenson's weakness (as 
by the way it also was Scott's) to huddle up his stories rather than 
to wind them off to an orderly conclusion. 

But against this allowance — a just but an ample one — for defects, 
must be set to Stevenson's credit such a combination of literary 
and story-telling charm as perhaps no writer except Merimee has 
ever equalled ; while, if the literary side of him had not the golden 
perfection, the accomplished ease of the Frenchman, his romance 
has a more genial, a fresher, a more natural quality. Generally, as 
in the famous examples of Scott, of Dumas, and of Balzac, the 
great story-tellers have been a little, deficient in mere style ; the 



STEVENSON 341 



fault in Stevenson, if it could be called a fault, was that the style 
was in excess. But this only set off and enhanced, it did not 
account for, the magic of his scene and character, from John 
Silver to Barbara Grant, from "The Suicide Club " to the escapes 
of Alan Breck. Very early, when most of his critical friends were 
urging him to cultivate the essay mainly, others discerned the 
supremacy of his story-telling faculty, and, years before the public 
fell in love with Treasure Island, bade him cultivate that. Fortu- 
nately he did so ; and his too short life has left a fairly ample 
store of work, not always quite equal, seldom quite without a 
flaw, but charming, stimulating, distinguished as few things in this 
last quarter of a century have been. 

Nearly all of Mr. Stevenson's contemporaries in novel-writing, 
as well as many distinguished persons far his seniors whose names 
will occur to every one, lie outside our limits. And in no chapter 
of this book, perhaps, is it so necessary to turn the back sternly 
on much interesting performance once famous and popular — not 
once only of interest to the reader of time and chance but put by 
this cause or that out of our reach. We cannot talk here of Emilia 
Wyndham or Paul Ferroll, both emphatically novels of their 
day, and that no short one ; and in the latter case, if not in the 
former, books deserving to be read at intervals by more than the 
bookworm. The exquisite Story without an End, which Sarah 
Austin half adapted, half translated, and which, with some un- 
usually good translations from Fouque" and others, set a whole 
fashion fifty years ago, must pass with mere allusion ; the abundant 
and not seldom excellent fiction of the earlier Hugh Church 
movement pleads in vain for detailed treatment. For all doors 
must be shut or open ; and this door must now be shut. 



CHAPTER VIII 



PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY 



It is the constant difficulty of the literary historian, especially if 
he is working on no very great scale, that he is confronted with 
what may be called " applied " literature, in which not only is the 
matter of superior importance to the form, but the importance of 
the matter itself disappears to a greater or less extent with time. 
In these cases it is only possible for him to take notice of those 
writers who, whatever the subject they handled, would have 
written literature, and perhaps of those who from the unusual 
eminence and permanence of their position in their own subjects 
have attained as it were an honorary position in literature itself. 

The literary importance and claim, however, of these applied 
branches varies considerably ; and there have been times when 
the two divisions whose names stand at the head of this chapter 
even surpassed — there have been not a few in which they 
equalled — any section of the purest belles lettres in strictly literary 
attractions. With rare exceptions this has not been the case 
during the present century ; poetry, fiction, history, and essay- 
writing having drawn off the best hands on the one side, while 
science has attracted them on the other. But the great Oxford 
Movement in the second quarter created no small amount of 
theological or ecclesiastical writing of unusual interest, while there 
had been earlier, and continued to be till almost the time when 
the occupation of the field by living writers warns us off, 
philosophers proper of great excellence. Latterly (indeed till 

342 



chap, vin BENTHAM 343 

quite recently, when a certain renaissance of philosophical writing 
not in jargon has taken place with a corresponding depression of 
the better kind of literary theology) the philosophers of Britain 
have not held a prominent place in her literature. Whether this 
was because they have mostly been content to Germanise, or 
because they have not been provided with sufficient individual 
talent, it is fortunately unnecessary for us to attempt to determine 
in this place and at this time. 

Among the dead writers of the century who are known wholly 
or mainly for the cultivation of philosophical studies, Bentham, 
Mackintosh, John Stuart Mill (to whom some would add his father 
James), Sir William Hamilton, Dean Mansel, are likely to hold a 
place in history, while at present many might be disposed to add 
the name of Mr. T. H. Green, a tutor of Balliol College, who 
between 1870 and his death propagated in Oxford a sort of neo- 
Hegelianism much tinctured with political and social Liberalism, 
and obtained a remarkable personal position. It is however as 
yet too early to assign a distinct historical place to one whose 
philosophy was in no sense original, though it was somewhat 
originally combined and applied, and who exhibited very small 
literary skill in setting forth. The others are already set " in the 
firm perspective of the past," and, with yet others who, still living, 
escape our grasp, have their names clearly marked for a place in 
an adequate history. 

Jeremy Bentham, a curious person who reminds one of a 
Hobbes without the literary genius, was born in London, near 
Houndsditch, as far back as 5th February 1748. He was the son 
of a solicitor who was very well off, and wished his son to take to 
the superior branch of the law. Jeremy was sent to Westminster, 
and thence to Queen's College, Oxford, in his thirteenth year. 
He was a Master of Arts at eighteen, and was called to the Bar 
six years later ; but he never practised. He must have been very 
early drawn to the study of the French philosophes ; much indeed 
of the doctrine which afterwards made him famous was either 
taken from, or incidentally anticipated by, Turgot and others of 



344 PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY chap. 

them, and it was a common remark, half in earnest half in gibe, 
that Bentham's views had made the tour of Europe in the French 
versions of Dumont before they attained to any attention in 
England. In 1 776 he wrote a Fragment on Government, a kind of 
critique of Blackstone, which is distinguished by acute one-sided 
deduction from Whig principles ; and he became a sort of prophet 
of the Whigs, who sometimes plagiarised and popularised, some- 
times neglected, his opinions. He never married, though he 
would have liked to do so ; and lived on his means till 1832, when 
he died in the eighty-fifth year of his age. His chief books after the 
Fragment had been his Theory of Punishments and Rewards ; 1787, 
Letters on Usury; 1789, Introduction to the Principles of Morals 
and Legislation ; 1813, Treatise on Evidence ; and 1824, Fallacies. 
The central pillar and hinge of all Bentham's doctrines in 
politics, morals, and law is the famous principle of Utility, or to 
use the cant phrase which he borrowed from Priestley, " the 
greatest happiness of the greatest number." What the greatest 
number is — for instance whether in a convict settlement of forty 
thieves and ten honest men, the thieves are to be consulted — and 
what happiness means, what is utility, what things have brought 
existing arrangements about, and what the loss of altering them 
might be, as well as a vast number of other points, Bentham 
never deigned to consider. Starting from a few crude phrases such 
as this, he raised a system remarkable for a sort of apparent 
consistency and thoroughness, and having the luck or the merit 
to hit off in parts not a few of the popular desires and fads of the 
age of the French Revolution and its sequel. But he was a 
political theorist rather than a political philosopher, his neglect of 
all the nobler elements of thought and feeling was complete, and 
latterly at least he wrote atrocious English, clumsy in composition 
and crammed with technical jargon. The brilliant fashion in 
which Sydney Smith has compressed and spirited his Fallacies 
into the famous " Noodle's Oration " is an example of the kind of 
treatment which Bentham requires in order to be made tolerable 
in form ; and even then he remains one-sided in fact. 



MACKINTOSH— THE MILLS 



345 



Sir James Mackintosh has been mentioned before, and is less 
of a philosopher pure and simple than any person included in 
this list — indeed his philosophical reputation rests almost wholly 
upon his brilliant, though rather slight, Dissertation on Ethics for 
the Encyclopedia Britannica. The greater part by far of his by no 
means short life (1765-1832) was occupied in practising medicine 
and law, in defending the French Revolution against Burke 
( Vindicice Gallicce, 1791); in defending the French Royalists in the 
person of Peltier against Bonaparte, 1803; in acting as Recorder 
and Judge in India, 1 804-181 1; and in political and literary 
work at home for the last twenty years, his literature being chiefly 
history, and contributions to the Edinburgh Review. But there 
has been a certain tendency, both in his own time and since, to 
regard Mackintosh as a sort of philosopher thrown away. If he 
was so, he would probably have made his mark rather in the 
history of philosophy than in philosophy itself, for there are no 
signs in him of much original depth. But he wrote very well, 
and was a sound and on the whole a fair critic. 

Of the two Mills, the elder, James, was like Mackintosh only 
an interim philosopher : his son John belongs wholly to our 
present subject. James was the son of a farmer, was born near 
Montrose in 1773, and intended to enter the ministry, but became 
a journalist instead. In the ten years or so after 1806, he com- 
posed a History of British India, which was long regarded as 
authoritative, but on which the gravest suspicions have recently 
been cast. Mill, in fact, was a violent politician of the Radical 
type, and his opinions of ethics were so peculiar that it is un- 
certain how far he might have carried them in dealing with 
historical characters. His book, however, gained him a high post 
in the East India Company, the Directors of which just at that 
time were animated by a wish to secure distinguished men of 
letters as servants. He nevertheless continued to write a good 
deal both in periodicals and in book form, the chief examples of 
the latter being his Political Economy, his Analysis of the Human 
Mind, and his Fragment on Mackintosh. James Mill, of whom 



346 PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY chap. 

most people have conceived a rather unfavourable idea since the 
appearance of his son's Autobiography, was an early disciple of 
Bentham, and to a certain extent resembled him in hard clearness 
and superficial consistency. 

His son John Stuart was born in London on 20th May 1806, 
and educated by his father in the unnatural fashion which he has 
himself recorded. Intellectually, however, he was not neglected, 
and after some years, spent mainly in France, he was, through his 
father's influence, appointed at seventeen to a clerkship in the 
India House, which gave him a competence for the rest of his 
life and a main occupation for thirty-four years of it. He was 
early brought into contact (by his father's friendship with Grote 
and others) with the Philosophical Radicals, as well as with many 
men of letters, especially Carlyle, of the destruction of the first 
version of whose French Revolution Mill (having lent it to his 
friend Mrs. Taylor) was the innocent cause. To this Mrs. Taylor, 
whom he afterwards married, Mill was fanatically attached, the 
attachment being the cause of some curious flights in his later 
work. His character was very amiable, and the immense in- 
fluence which, especially in the later years of his life, he exer- 
cised, was partly helped by his personal friendships. But it was 
unfortunate for him that in 1865 he was returned to Parliament. 
His political views, though it was the eve of the triumph of what 
might be called his party, were doctrinaire and out of date, and 
his life had given him no practical hold of affairs, so that he more 
than fulfilled the usual prophecy of failure in the case of men of 
thought who are brought late in life into action. Fortunately for 
him he was defeated in 1868, and passed the rest of his life 
mostly in France, dying at Avignon on 8th May 1873. 

Brought up in an atmosphere of discussion and of books, 
Mill soon took to periodical writing, and in early middle life was 
for some years editor of the London and Westminster Review ; but 
his literary ambition, which directed itself not to pure literature 
but to philosophical and political discussion, was not content with 
periodical writing as an exercise, and his circumstances enabled 



viii J. S. MILL 347 

him to do without it as a business. In 1843 ne published what 
is undoubtedly his chief work, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and 
Inductive, five years later a companion treatise on Political 
Economy which may perhaps rank second. In 1859 his essay on 
Liberty, a short but very attractive exposition of his political 
principles, appeared ; next year a collection of essays entitled 
Dissertations and Discussions. After lesser works on Utilitarian- 
ism and on Comte, of whom he had been a supporter in more 
senses than one, but whose later eccentricities revolted him, he 
issued in 1865 his Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philo- 
sophy, which ranks as the third of his chief works, and completes 
his system, as far as a system so negative can be said to be com- 
pleted, on the side of theology and metaphysics. Among his 
smaller works may be mentioned Representative Government, and 
(very late) the fanatical and curious Subjection of Women. His 
Autobiography, an interesting but melancholy book, appeared 
shortly after his death. 

Mill must be accounted on the whole by good judges, even if 
they are utterly opposed to his whole system of philosophy, the 
chief philosophical writer of England in this century ; and the 
enormous though not permanent influence which he attained 
about its middle was deserved, partly by qualities purely literary, 
but partly also by some purely philosophical. He had inherited 
from his father not merely the theoretical exaltation of liberty 
(except in the philosophical sense) which characterised eighteenth 
century philosophers, but also that arrogant and pragmatical im- 
patience of the supernatural which was to a still greater extent 
that century's characteristic. The arrogance and the pragmati- 
cally changed in John Stuart Mill's milder nature to a sort of 
nervous dread of admitting even the possibility of things not 
numerable, ponderable, and measurable ; and it may be observed 
with amusement that for the usual division of logic into Deductive 
and Inductive he substituted Ratiocinative for the first member, 
so as not even by implication to admit the possibility of deduction 
from any principles not inductively given. So, too, later, in his 



34 8 PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY chap. 

Examination of Sir William Hamilton, between the opposing 
spectres of Realism and Idealism, he was driven to take refuge in 
what he called " permanent possibilities " of Sensation, though 
logicians vainly asked how he assured himself of the permanence, 
and jesters rudely observed that to call a bottle of gin a "per- 
manent possibility of drunkenness " was an unnecessary complica- 
tion of language for a very small end or meaning. His great 
philosophical weapon (borrowed from though of course not in- 
vented by his father) was the Association of Ideas, just as his clue 
in political economy was in the main though not exclusively 
laissez-faire, in ethics a modified utilitarianism, and in politics an 
absolute deference to, tempered by a resigned distrust of, the 
majority. The defect in a higher and more architectonic theory 
of the world with which he 'has been charged is not quite justly 
chargeable, for from his point of view no such theory was possible. 

Even those, however, who, as the present writer acknowledges 
in his own case, are totally opposed to the whole Millian con- 
ception of logic and politics, of metaphysics and morality, must, 
unless prejudiced, admit his great merits of method and treatment. 
He not only very seldom smuggles in sophistry into the middle of 
his arguments, but even paralogisms are not common with him ; 
it is with his premises, not with his conclusions, that you must 
deal if you wish to upset him. Unlike most contemners of formal 
logic, he is not in much danger, as far as his merely dialectic 
processes go, from formal logic itself; and it is in the arbitrary 
and partial character of his preliminary admissions, assumptions, 
and exclusions that the weak points of his system are to be 
found. 

His style has also very considerable merits. It is not brilliant 
or charming ; it has neither great strength nor great stateliness. 
But it is perfectly clear, it is impossible to mistake its meaning, 
and its simplicity is unattended by any of the down-at-heel neglect 
of neatness and elegance which is to be found, for instance, in 
Locke. Little scholastic as he was in most ways, Mill had far 
outgrown the ignorant eighteenth century contempt of the School- 



HAMILTON 349 



men, and had learnt from them an exact precision of statement 
and argument, while he had managed to keep (without its con- 
comitant looseness and vulgarity) much of the eighteenth century's 
wholesome aversion to jargon and to excess of terminology. In 
presenting complicated statements of detail, as in the Political 
Economy, the Representative Government, and elsewhere, he has 
as much lucidity as Macaulay, with an almost total freedom from 
Macaulay's misleading and delusive suppression of material details. 
And besides his usual kind of calm and measured argument, he 
can occasionally, as in divers passages of the Sir William Hamil- 
ton and the political books, rise or sink from the logical and 
rhetorical points of view respectively to an impassioned advocacy, 
which, though it may be rarely proof against criticism, is very 
agreeable so far as it goes. That Mill wholly escaped the defects 
of the popular philosopher, I do not suppose that even those who 
sympathise with his views would contend ; though they might 
not admit, as others would, that these defects were inseparable 
from his philosophy in itself. But it may be doubtful whether, 
all things considered, a better litej-ary type of the popular 
philosopher exists in modern English ; and it certainly is not 
surprising that, falling in as he did with the current mode of 
thought, and providing it with a defence specious in reasoning 
and attractive in language, he should have attained an influence 
perhaps greater than that of which any English philosophical 
writer has been able during his lifetime to boast. 

The convenience of noticing the Mills together, and of putting 
Sir William Hamilton next to his most famous disciples, seems 
to justify a certain departure from strict chronological order. 
Hamilton was indeed considerably the senior of his critic, having 
been born on 8th March 1788. His father and grandfather, both 
professors at the University of Glasgow, had been plain " Dr. 
Hamilton." But they inherited, and Sir William made good, the 
claim to a baronetcy which had been in abeyance since the days 
of Robert Hamilton, the Covenanting leader. He himself pro- 
ceeded from Glasgow, with a Snell Exhibition, to Balliol in 1809. 



350 PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY chap. 

He was called to the Scottish Bar, but never practised, though 
some business came to him as Crown solicitor in the Court of 
Teinds (tithes). He competed in 1820 for the Chair of Moral 
Philosophy, which Wilson, with far inferior claims, obtained ; but 
it is fair to say that at the time the one candidate had given no 
more public proofs of fitness than the other. Soon, however, he 
began to make his mark as a contributor of philosophical articles 
to the Edinburgh Review, and in 1836 he obtained a professorship 
in the University for which he was even better fitted — that of 
Logic and Metaphysics. His lectures became celebrated, but he 
never published them ; indeed his only publication of any im- 
portance during his lifetime was a collection of his articles under 
the title of Dissertations, with the exception of his monumental 
edition of Reid, on which he spent, and on which it has some- 
times been held that he wasted, most of his time. He died in 
1856, and his lectures were published after his death by his 
successor, Professor Veitch (himself an enthusiastic devotee of 
literature, especially Border literature, as well as of philosophy), 
and his greatest disciple, Mansel, between 1859 and 1861. And 
this was how Mill's Examination came to be posthumous. The 
" Philosophy of the Conditioned," as Hamilton's is for shortness 
called, could not be described in any brief, and perhaps not with 
propriety in any, space of the present volume. It is enough to 
say that it was an attempt to reinforce the so-called " Scotch 
Philosophy " of Reid against Hume by the help of Kant, as well 
as at once to continue and evade the latter without resorting 
either to Transcendentalism or to the experience-philosophy 
popular in England. In logic, Hamilton was a great and justly 
honoured defender of the formal view of the science which had 
been in persistent disrepute during the eighteenth century ; but 
some of the warmest lovers of logic doubt whether his technical 
inventions or discoveries, such as the famous Quantification of 
the Predicate, are more than " pretty " in the sense of mathe- 
maticians and wine-merchants. This part of his doctrine, by the 
way, attracted special attention, and was carefully elaborated by 



via HAMILTON — FERRIER 351 

another disciple, Professor Thomas Spencer Baynes (182 3- 188 7), 
who, after chequering philosophy with journalism, became editor of 
the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and a careful Shakespearian student. 
Yet another disciple, and the most distinguished save one, was 
James Frederick Ferrier, nephew of Susan Ferrier, to whom 
we owe three most brilliant novels, who was born in 1808 
and died in 1864 at St. Andrews, where he had for nearly 
twenty years been Professor of Moral Philosophy, after previously 
holding for a short time a History Professorship at Edinburgh. 
Of this latter University Ferrier had been an alumnus, as well as of 
Oxford. He edited his father-in-law Wilson's works, and was a 
contributor to Blackwood's Magazine, but his chief book was his 
Institutes of Metaphy sic, published in 1854. Too strong a Ham- 
iltonian influence (not in style but in some other ways), and an 
attempt at an almost Spinosian rigidity of method, have sometimes 
been held to have marred Ferrier's philosophical performance ; 
but it is certain that he had the makings of a great metaphysician, 
and that he was actually no small one. 

The great merit of Hamilton was that he, in a somewhat irreg- 
ular and informal way (for, as has been said, he was ostensibly 
more a commentator and critic than an independent theorist), 
introduced German speculation into England after a fashion 
far more thorough than the earlier but dilettante and haphazard 
attempts of De Quincey and Coleridge, and contributed vastly to 
the lifting of the whole tone and strain of English philosophic 
disputation from the slovenly commonsense into which it had 
fallen. In fact, he restored metaphysics proper as a part of 
English current thought ; and helped (though here he was not 
alone) to restore logic. His defects were, in the first place, that 
he was at once too systematic and two piecemeal in theory, and 
worse still, that his philosophical style was one of the very worst 
existing, or that could exist. That this may have been in some 
degree a designed reaction from ostentatious popularity is probable ; 
and that it was in great part caught from his studious frequenta- 
tion of that Hercynian forest, which takes the place of the groves 



352 PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY chap. 

of Academe in German philosophical writing, is certain. But 
the hideousness of his dialect is a melancholy fact; and it may 
be said to have contributed at least as much to the decadence of 
his philosophical vogue as any defects in the philosophy itself. 
He was, in fact, at the antipodes from Mill in attractiveness of 
form as well as in character of doctrine. 

There are some who think that Henry Longueville Mansel was 
actually in more than one respect, and might, with some slight 
changes of accidental circumstance, have been indisputably, the 
greatest philosopher of Britain in the nineteenth century. Of the 
opinion entertained by contemporaries of great intellectual gifts, 
that of Mark Pattison, a bitter political and academical opponent, 
and the most acrimonious critic of his time, that Mansel was, 
though according to Pattison's view, an "arch-jobber," an "acute 
thinker, and a metaphysician " seems pretty conclusive. But 
Mansel died in middle age, he was much occupied in various 
kinds of University business, and he is said by those who knew 
him to have been personally rather indolent. He was born in 
Northamptonshire on 6th October 1820, and after schooldays at 
Merchant Taylors' passed in the then natural course to St. John's 
College, Oxford, of which he became fellow. He was an active 
opponent of the first University Commission, in reference to which 
he wrote the most brilliant satire of the kind proper to University 
wits which this century has produced — the Aristophanic parody 
entitled Phrontisterion. But the Commission returned him good 
for evil, insomuch as he became the first Waynflete Professor of 
Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, a post created in consequence 
of it. In 1859 he was Bampton Lecturer, and his sermons in 
this office again attained the first excellence in style, though they 
were made the subject of severe criticism not merely by the 
disciples of Liberal philosophy, but by some timid defenders of 
orthodoxy, for their bold application of the philosophy of the con- 
ditioned, on scholastic lines, to the problems of theodicy. Mansel 
was not a more frequent lecturer than the somewhat indulgent 
conditions of the English Universities, especially Oxford, even 



vm MANSEL 353 

after the Commission, required ; but his deliverances were of 
exceptional importance, both in conception and expression. At 
the death of Milman, his political friends being in power, he was 
made Dean of St. Paul's, but enjoyed the dignity only a short 
time, and died in 1870. Besides Phrontisterion and his Bampton 
Lectures, which bring him under both the divisions of this 
chapter, he had published in his lifetime an excellent edition of 
Aldrich's " Logic," Prolegomena Logica (the principal work of the 
Hamiltonian school, though quite independent in main points), 
and an enlarged edition of an Encyclopaedia dissertation on 
Metaphysics. His essays, chiefly from the Quarterly Review, 
were published after his death, with Phrontisterion and other 
things. 

It will appear from this brief summary that Mansel was a 
many-sided man ; and it may be added that he possessed an 
exceptionally keen wit, by no means confined to professional sub- 
jects, and was altogether far more of a man of the world than is 
usual in a philosopher. But though this man-of-the-worldliness 
may have affected the extent and quantity of his philosophical 
work, it did not touch the quality of it. It may be contended 
that Mansel was on the whole rather intended for a critic or 
historian of philosophy than for an independent philosophical 
teacher ; and in this he would but have exhibited a tendency of his 
century. Yet he was very far from mere slavish following even 
of Hamilton, while the copying, with a little travesty and adjust- 
ment of German originals, on which so much philosophical repute 
has been founded in England, was entirely foreign to his nature 
and thought. In Mill's Examination of Hamilton, the Bampton 
Lectures, above referred to, came in for the most vehement 
protest, for Mill, less blind than the orthodox objectors, perceived 
that their drift was to steer clear of some of the commonest and 
most dangerous reefs and shoals on which the orthodoxy of 
intelligent but not far-sighted minds has for some generations past 
been wrecked. But Mansel's rejoinder, written at a time when 
he was more than ever distracted by avocations, and hampered 



354 PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY ckap. 

certainly by the necessity of speaking for his master as well as for 
himself, and probably by considerations of expediency in respect 
to the duller of the faithful, was not his happiest work. In fact 
he was too clear and profound a thinker to be first-rate in con- 
troversy — a function which requires either unusual dishonesty or 
one-sidedness in an unusual degree. He may sometimes have 
been a very little of a sophist — it is perhaps impossible to be a 
great philosopher without some such touch. But of paralogism — of 
that sincere advancing of false argument which from the time of 
Plato has been justly regarded as the most fatal of philosophic 
drawbacks — there is no trace in Mansel. His natural genius, 
moreover, assisted by his practice in miscellaneous writing, which 
though much less in amount of result than Mill's was even more 
various in kind, equipped him with a most admirable philosophical 
style, hitting the exact mean between the over-popular and the 
over-technical, endowing even the Prolegomena Logica with a 
perfect readableness, and in the Metaphysics and large parts of 
the editorial matter of the Aldrich showing capacities which make 
it deeply to be regretted that he never undertook a regular history 
of philosophy. 

The place which might have been thus filled, was accepted 
but partially and with no capital success by divers writers. 
Frederick Denison Maurice, who will be mentioned again in 
this chapter, wrote on Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, but 
the book, though like all his work attractively written, does not 
show very wide or very profound knowledge of the subject. The 
Lectures on the History of Ancient Philosophy, by William Archer 
Butler, a Dublin professor, who died prematurely, would prob- 
ably, had the author lived, have formed the best history of the 
subject in English, and even in their fragmentary condition make 
an admirable book, free from jargon, not unduly popular, but at 
once sound and literary. The most ambitious attempt at the 
whole subject was that of George Henry Lewes, the companion of 
George Eliot, a versatile man of letters of great ability, who 
brought out on a small scale in 1845, and afterwards on a much 



vin WHATELY — WHEWELL 355 

larger one, a Biographical History of Philosophy. This, though 
occasionally superficial, and too much tinged with a sort of 
second-hand Positivism, had, as the qualities of these defects, an 
excellent though sometimes a rather treacherous clearness, and a 
unity of vision which is perhaps more valuable for fairly intelligent 
readers than desultory profundity. But it can hardly take rank 
as a book of philosophical scholarship, though it is almost a brilliant 
specimen of popular philosophical literature. 

Philosophy, science, and perhaps theology may dispute be- 
tween them two remarkable figures, nearly contemporary, the one 
an Oxford and the other a Cambridge man — Whately and 
Whewell. Besides the differences which their respective uni- 
versities impress upon nearly all strong characters, there were 
others between them, Whately being the better bred, the more 
accomplished writer, and the more original, Whewell the more 
widely informed, and perhaps the more thoroughgoing. But 
both were curiously English in a sort of knock-me-down 
Johnsonian dogmatism ; and both were in consequence extremely 
intolerant. For Whately's so-called impartiality consisted in 
being equally biassed against Evangelicals and Tractarians ; and 
both were accused by their unfriends of being a little addicted to 
the encouragement of flatterers and toadies. Richard Whately, the 
elder, was born in London in 1787, his father being a clergyman 
in the enjoyment of several pluralities. He went to Oriel, gained 
a fellowship there in 181 1, and was with intervals a resident 
in Oxford for some twenty years, being latterly Principal of St. 
Alban Hall (where he made Newman his Vice-Principal), and in 
1829 Professor of Political Economy. In 1831 the Whigs made 
him Archbishop of Dublin, which difficult post he held for more 
than thirty years till his death in 1863. His work is not very 
extensive, but it is remarkable. His Historic Doubts relative to 
Napoleon Bonaparte was an exceedingly clever " skit " on the 
Rationalist position in regard to miracles and biblical criticism 
generally ; though Whately's orthodoxy was none of the strictest. 
His Bampton Lectures on Party Feeling in Religion preceded 



356 PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY chap. 

rather curiously the greatest outburst of the said party feeling 
which had been seen in England since the seventeenth century. 
But the books by which he is or was most widely known are his 
Logic and Rhetoric, expansions of Encyclopaedia articles (1826 
and 1828) intentionally popular and perhaps almost unnecessarily 
exoteric, but extremely stimulating and clear. Whately, who had 
some points in common with Sydney Smith, was, like him, in part 
the victim of the extreme want of accuracy and range in the 
Oxford education of his youth ; but his mental and literary powers 
were great. 

William Whewell, the son of a carpenter, showed talent for 
mathematics early, and obtaining an exhibition at Trinity, Cam- 
bridge, became fellow, tutor, and Master of his College. He 
had the advantage, which his special studies gave, of more 
thorough training, and extended his attention from pure and 
applied mathematics to science and a kind of philosophy. His 
chief works were The History (1837) and The Philosophy (1840) of 
the Inductive Sciences, his Bridgewater Treatise on Astronomy and 
Physic in Reference to Natural Philosophy (1833) and his Plurality 
of Worlds (1853) being also famous in their day; but he wrote 
voluminously in various kinds. He was rather a bully, and his 
work has no extraordinary merit of style, but it is interesting as 
being among the latest in which science permitted her votaries 
not to specialise very much, and rather to apply the ancient 
education to the new subjects than to be wholly theirs. 

If the difficulty of deciding on rejection or admission be great 
in the case of philosophers proper, much greater is it in the 
numerous subdivisions which are themselves applied philosophy 
as philosophy is applied literature. The two chief of these per- 
haps are Jurisprudence and Political Economy. Under the head 
of the first, three remarkable writers at least absolutely demand 
notice — Austin, Maine, and Stephen. The first of these was in 
respect of influence, if not also of actual accomplishment, one of 
the most noteworthy Englishmen of the century. Born in 1790, 
he died in 1859, having begun life in the Army which he exchanged 



AUSTIN — MAINE 



357 



for the Bar not long after Waterloo. He was made Professor of 
Jurisprudence in the new University College of London in 1827. 
He held this post for five years only ; but it resulted in his famous 
Province of Jurisprudence Determined, a book standing more or 
less alone in English. He did not publish much else, though he 
did some official work ; and his Lectures on Jurisprudence were 
posthumously edited by his wife, a Miss Taylor of Norwich, who 
has been referred to as translator of the Story without an End, 
and who did much other good work. Austin (whose younger 
brother Charles (1 799-1874) left little if anything in print but 
accumulated a great fortune at the Parliamentary Bar, and left a 
greater, though vague, conversational reputation) had bad health 
almost throughout his life, and his work is not large in bulk. At 
first pooh-poohed and neglected, almost extravagantly prized later, 
and later still, according to the usual round, a little cavilled at, it 
presents Utilitarian theory at its best in the intellectual way ; and 
its disciplinary value, if it is not taken for gospel, can hardly be 
overrated. But its extreme clearness, closeness, and logical pre- 
cision carry with them the almost inevitable defects of hardness, 
narrowness, and want of " play," as well as of that most fatal of 
intellectual attitudes which takes for granted that everything is 
explicable. Still, these were the defects of Austin's school and 
time ; his merits were individual, and indeed very nearly unique. 

Sir Henry James Summer Maine was born in 1822, and 
educated first as a Blue Coat boy and then at Pembroke College, 
Cambridge. After a quite exceptional career as an undergraduate, 
he became fellow of Trinity Hall, of which he died Master in 
1 888. But he had only held this latter post for eleven years, and 
the midmost of his career was occupied with quite different work. 
He had been made Professor of Civil Law in his University in 
1847, at a very early age, when he had not even been called to the 
Bar ; but he supplied this omission three years later, and a little 
later still exchanged his Cambridge Professorship for a Reader- 
ship at Lincoln's Inn. In 1862 he obtained the appointment, 
famous from its connection with letters, of Legal Member of the 



358 PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY chap. 

Viceroy's Council in India. On quitting it after seven years he 
was transferred to the Council at Home, and became Professor of 
Comparative Jurisprudence at Oxford. Besides his work as a 
reviewer, which was considerable, Maine wrote — in an admirable 
style, and with a scholarship and sense which, in the recrudes- 
cence of more barbaric thought, have brought down socialist and 
other curses on his head — many works on the philosophy of law, 
politics, and history, the chief of which were his famous Ancient 
Law ( 1 86 1 ) , Village Communities ( 1 8 7 1 ) , Early Law and Custom 
(1883), with a severe criticism on Democracy called Popular 
Government (1885). Few writers of our time could claim the 
phrase mitis sapentia as Maine could, though it is possible that 
he was a little too much given to theorise. But his influence in 
checking that of Austin was admirable. 

A colleague of Maine's on the Saturday Review, his successor 
in his Indian post, like him a malleus demagogorum, but in 
some ways no small contrast, was Sir James Fitzjames Stephen 
(1829-94), the most distinguished member of a family unusually 
distinguished during the past century in the public service and in 
literature. His father, Sir James Stephen, was himself well known 
as a reviewer, as a civil servant, as Professor of Modern History 
at Cambridge, and as author of Essays in Ecclesiastical History 
and Lectures on the History of France (1849 an d 185 1). The 
second Sir James was born at Kensington in 1829, went to Eton, 
thence to King's College, London, and thence to Trinity, Cam- 
bridge, and was called to the Bar in 1854. His legal career was 
brilliant and varied, and led him to the Bench, which he resigned 
shortly before his death. Sir James Stephen published some 
works of capital importance on his own subject, the chief relating 
the Criminal Law, collected both earlier and later a good deal of 
his Saturday work, discussed a famous passage of Indian History 
in the Story of Neocomar (1885), and wrote not a little criticism — 
political, theological, and other — of a somewhat negative but 
admirably clear-headed kind — the chief expression of which is 
Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity (1873). 



MALTHUS 359 



Even less room can be given to the Political Economists than 
to the "Jurisprudents," partly because the best writers of them, 
such as J. S. Mill, have figured or will figure elsewhere ; partly 
because, from Ricardo to Jevons and Cliffe Leslie, though they 
have often displayed no mean literary power, the necessities or 
supposed necessities of their subject have usually kept their books 
further away from belles lettrcs than the documents of any other 
department of what is widely called philosophy. But a paragraph 
must at least be given to one of the earliest and one of the most 
famous of them. 

If a prize were offered to the best-abused person in English 
literature, few competitors would have much chance with Thomas 
Robert Malthus, author of the Essay on the Principles of Popula- 
tion (1798), and of divers works on Political Economy, of which 
he was Professor in the East India College at Haileybury. To 
judge from the references which for many years used to be, and 
to some extent still are, made to Malthus, still more from the way 
in which the term " Malthusian " is still often used, he might be 
supposed to have been a reprobate anarchist and revolutionary, 
who had before his eyes neither the fear of God, nor the love of 
man, nor the respect of morality and public opinion. As a matter 
of fact Malthus was a most respectable and amiable clergyman, 
orthodox I believe in religion, Tory I believe in politics, who 
incurred odium chiefly by his inculcation of the most disagreeable 
lessons of the new and cheerless science which he professed. 
Born on 24th February 1 766 near Dorking, of a very respectable 
family, he went to Cambridge, took honours, a fellowship at his 
college (Jesus), and orders, obtained a benefice, and spent most of 
the last thirty years of his life in the Professorship above referred 
to, dying in 1854. His Essay was one of the numerous counter- 
blasts to Godwin's anarchic perfectibilism, and its general drift 
was simply to show that the increase of population, unless counter- 
acted by individual and moral self-restraint, must reduce humanity 
to misery. The special formula that " population increases in a 
geometrical, food in a arithmetical ratio," is overstrained and a 



360 PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY chap. 

little absurd ; the general principle is sound beyond all question, 
and not only consistent with, but absolutely deducible from, the 
purest Christian doctrines. Malthus wrote well, he knew thoroughly 
what he was writing about, and he suffers only from the inevitable 
drawback to all writers on such subjects who have not positive 
genius of form, that a time comes when their contentions appear 
self-evident to all who are not ignorant or prejudiced. 

The greatest theological interest of the century belongs to what 
is diversely called the Oxford and the Tractarian Movement ; 
while, even if this statement be challenged on non-literary grounds, 
it will scarcely be so by any one on grounds literary. For the 
present purpose, of course, nothing like a full account of the 
Movement can be attempted. It is enough to say that it arose 
partly in reaction from the Evangelical tendency which had 
dominated the more active section of the Church of England 
for many years, partly in protest against the Liberalising and 
Latitudinarian tendency in matters both temporal and spiritual. 
In contradistinction to its predecessor (for the Evangelicals had 
been the reverse of literary), it was from the first — i.e. about 1830, 
or earlier if we take The Christian Year as a harbinger of it — a 
very literary movement both in verse and prose. Of its three 
leaders, Pusey — whose name, given to it in derision and sometimes 
contested by sympathisers as unappropriate, unquestionably ranks 
of right as that of its greatest theologian, its most steadfast char- 
acter, and the most of a born leader engaged in it — was some- 
thing less of a pure man of letters than either Keble or Newman. 
But he was a man of letters ; and perhaps a greater one than is 
usually thought. 

Edward Bouverie Pusey, who belonged to the family of Lord 
Folkestone by blood, his father having become by bequest the 
representative of the very old Berkshire house of Pusey, was 
born at the seat of this family in 1800. He went to Eton and to 
Christ Church, and became a fellow of Oriel, studied theology 
and oriental languages in Germany, and was made Professor of 
Hebrew at the early age of twenty-seven. He was a thorough 



via PUSEY 361 

scholar, and even in the times of his greatest unpopularity no 
charge of want of competence for his post was brought against 
him by any one who knew. It is, however, somewhat comic 
that charges of Rationalism were brought against his first book, a 
study of contemporary German theology. In or soon after 1833 
he joined Newman and Keble in the famous Tracts for the Times, 
at the same time urging the return to a more primitive and 
catholic theology in his sermons, and by means of the great 
enterprise in translation called the Oxford Library of the Fathers, 
of which he executed part and sedulously edited others. Pusey 
first came before general public notice outside Oxford in 1843, 
in consequence of a very high-handed exertion of power by the 
authorities of the University, who, without allowing him a hearing, 
suspended him for a sermon on the Eucharist from preaching for 
three years. His mouth was thus closed at the very moment 
when Newman "went over" ; and when some of the enemies of 
the movement declared that Pusey would go too. Others were 
equally certain that if he stayed it was either from base motives 
of self-interest, or, still more basely, in order to do underhand 
damage to the Church. But all who unite knowledge and fairness 
now admit, not only his perfect loyalty, but the almost unexam- 
pled heroism and steadfastness with which for some ten or 
fifteen years after Newman's secession, against popular obloquy, 
against something very like persecution from the authorities of 
the Church and the University, and against the constant and 
repeated discouragement given by the desertion of friends and 
colleagues, he upheld his cause and made the despised and re- 
proached " Puseyites " of his middle life what he lived to see 
them — the greatest and almost the dominant party in the Angli- 
can Church. He was less fortunate in his opposition to the 
secularising of the Universities, and in his attempts (which ill- 
willers did not fail to liken to the attempts made to stifle his own 
teaching) to check by legal means the spread of Rationalism. 
But he was nearly as full of honours as of years when he died on 
16th September 1882. 



362 PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY chap. 

Many of the constituents of this remarkable and perhaps unex- 
ampled success — Pusey's personal saintliness, his unselfish use 
of his considerable income, his unwearied benevolence in other 
than pecuniary ways — do not concern us here. But his works, 
which are numerous, and the most literary of which are his 
Sermons and his Eirenicon, contributed not a little to it. Pusey's 
style was accused by some of bareness and byjothers of obscurity; 
but these accusations may be safely dismissed as due merely to 
the prevalent fancy for florid expression, and to the impatience of 
somewhat scholastically arranged argument which has also dis- 
tinguished our times. 

The second of this remarkable trio, John Keble, was the eldest, 
having been born on 24th April 1792, at Fairford, in Gloucester- 
shire, with which county his family had for some centuries been 
connected. Keble's father was a clergyman, and there was a 
clerical feeling and tradition in the whole family. John went to 
no public school, but was very carefully educated at home, 
obtained an open scholarship at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, 
when he was only fourteen, and went into residence next year — 
for just at this time extremely early entrance at the University 
was much commoner than a little earlier or later. He had only 
just entered his nineteenth year when he took a double first, and 
had not concluded it when he was elected, at the same time with 
Whately, to an Oriel fellowship. He followed this up by winning 
both the Chancellor's Essays, English and Latin, and established 
his reputation as the most brilliant man of his day. He was 
ordained as soon as he could be, and served the usual offices of 
tutor in his College and examiner in the University. But even 
such semi-public life as this was distasteful to him, and he soon 
gave up his Oriel tutorship for a country curacy and private pupils. 
Indeed the note, some would say the fault, of Keble's whole life 
was an almost morbid retiringness, which made him in 1827 refuse 
even to compete with Hawkins for the Provostship of Oriel. It 
is possible that he would not have been elected, for oddly enough 
his two future colleagues in the triumvirate, both Fellows, were 



vin KEBLE 363 

both in favour of his rival ; but his shunning the contest has been 
deeply deplored, and by some even blamed as a gran rifiuto. The 
publication of The Christian Year, however, which immediately 
followed, probably did more for the Movement and for the 
spiritual life of England than any office-holding could have 
done; and in 1831, Keble, being elected Professor of Poetry, 
distinguished himself almost as much in criticism as he had 
already done in poetry. He obtained, and was contented with, 
the living of Hursley, in Hampshire, where he resided till his 
death on 29th March 1866. 

Keble's very generally granted character as one of the 
holiest persons of modern times, and even his influence on 
the Oxford Movement, concern us less here than his literary 
work, which was of almost the first importance merely as 
literature. The reaction from an enormous popularity of nearly 
seventy years' date, and the growth of anti-dogmatic opinions, 
have brought about a sort of tendency in some quarters to 
belittle, if not positively to sneer at, The Christian Year, which, 
with the Lyra Innocentium and a collection of Miscellaneous 
Poems, contains Keble's poetical work. There never was any- 
thing more uncritical. The famous reference which Thackeray — 
the least ecclesiastically inclined, if by no means the least re- 
ligious, of English men of letters of genius in this century — makes 
to its appearance in Pendennis, shows what the thoughts of un- 
biassed contemporaries were. x\nd no very different judgment 
can be formed by unbiassed posterity. With Herbert and Miss 
Rossetti, Keble ranks as the greatest of English writers in sacred 
verse, the irregular and unequal efforts of Vaughan and Crashaw 
sometimes transcending, oftener sinking below the three. If 
Keble has not the exquisite poetical mysticism of Christina 
Rossetti he is more copious and more strictly scholarly, while 
he escapes the quaint triviality, or the triviality sometimes not 
even quaint, which mars Herbert. The influence of Wordsworth 
is strongly shown, but it is rendered and redirected in an entirely 
original manner. The lack of taste which mars so much religious 



364 PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY chap. 

poetry never shows itself even for a moment in Keble ; yet the 
correctness of his diction, like the orthodoxy of his thought, is 
never frigid or tame.- There are few poets who so well deserve 
the nickname of a Christian Horace, though the phrase may 
seem to have something of the parodox of " prose Shakespeare." 
The careful melody of the versification and the exact felicity of 
the diction exclude, it may be, those highest nights which create 
most enthusiasm, at any rate in this century. But for measure, 
proportion, successful attainment of the proposed end, Keble has 
few superiors. 

It would indeed be surprising if he had many, for, with his 
gift of verse, he was also one of the most accomplished of critics. 
His Prczlectiones Acade?nicce, written, as the rule then was, in 
Latin, is unfortunately a sealed book to too many persons whom 
modern practice calls and strives to consider " educated " ; but he 
did not confine himself even in these to classical subjects, and he 
wrote not a few reviews in English dealing with modern poetry. 
His aesthetics are of course deeply tinged with ethic; but he does 
not in the least allow moral prepossessions to twist his poetic 
theory, which may be generally described as the Aristotelian 
teaching on the subject, supplied and assisted by the aid of a 
wide study of the literatures not open to Aristotle. There can 
be no doubt that if Keble's mind had not been more and more 
absorbed by religious subjects he would have been one of the 
very greatest of English critics of literature ; and he is not far 
from being a great one as it is. He did not publish many 
sermons, though one of his, the Assize Sermon at Oxford in 
1833, is considered to have started the Movement; and opinions 
as to his pulpit powers have varied. But it is certainly not too 
much to say that it was impossible for Keble not to make every- 
thing that he wrote, whether in verse or prose, literature of the 
most perfect academic kind, informed by the spirit of scholarship 
and strengthened by individual talent. 

John Henry Newman was the eldest son of a man of business 
of some means (who came of a family of Cambridgeshire yeomen) 



viii NEWMAN 365 

and of a lady of Huguenot descent. He was born in London 
on 2 1 st February 1801, was educated privately at Ealing, 
imbibed strong evangelical principles, and went up to Oxford 
(Trinity College) so early that he went in for " Greats " (in which 
he only obtained a third class) before he was nineteen. He con- 
tinued, however, to reside at Trinity, where he held a scholarship, 
and more than made up for his mishap in the schools by winning 
an Oriel fellowship in 1S23. In three successive years he took 
orders and a curacy in the first, the Vice-Principalship of St. 
Alban's Hall under Whately in the second, and an Oriel tutor- 
ship in the third; while in 1827 he succeeded Hawkins, who 
became Provost, in the Vicarage of St. Mary's, the most important 
post of the kind — to a man who chose to make it important — 
in Oxford. 

Newman did so choose, and his sermons — not those to the 
University, though these also are notable, but those nominally 
" Parochial," really addressed to the undergraduates who soonflocked 
to hear him — were the foundation and mainstay of his influence, 
constitute the largest single division of his printed work, and perhaps 
present that work in the best and fairest light. His history for the 
next sixteen years cannot be attempted here ; it is the history of 
the famous thing called the Oxford Movement, which changed the 
intellectual as well as the ecclesiastical face of England, on which 
libraries have been written, and which, even yet, has not been 
satisfactorily or finally judged. His travels with Hurrell Froude 
in the Mediterranean during 1832-33 seem to have been the 
special turning-point of his career. After ten years, perhaps of 
"development," certainly of hard fighting, he resigned St. Mary's 
in 1843, and after two years more of halting between two 
opinions he was received into the Church of Rome in October 
1845. He left Oxford, never to return to it as a residence, and 
not to visit it for thirty-two years, in the following February. 

His first public appearance after this was in the once famous 
Achilli trial for libel, in which the plaintiff, an anti-Roman 
lecturer, recovered damages from Newman for an utterly damning 



366 PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY chap. 

description of Achilli's career in the Roman Church itself. 
Impartial judges generally thought and think that the verdict 
was against the weight of evidence. At any rate it produced 
a decided revulsion in Newman's favour, of which he was both 
too convinced of his own position and too astute not to take 
advantage. He had hitherto since his secession resided (he had 
been re-ordained in Rome) at Birmingham, London, and Dublin, 
but he now took up his abode, practically for the rest of his life, at 
Birmingham or rather Edgbaston. In 1864 the great opportunity, 
presented by Kingsley's unguarded words {vide supra), occurred, 
and he availed himself of it at once. Most of those who read 
the Apologia pro Vita Sua were not familiar with Newman's 
masterly English, and his competent, if not supreme, dialectic 
and sophistic. They were not, as a former generation had been, 
prejudiced against him ; the untiring work of those of his former 
friends who remained faithful to the Church of England had of 
itself secured him a fair hearing. During the remaining twenty- 
five years of his life he had never again to complain of ostracism 
or unfair prejudice. The controversy as to the Vatican Council 
brought him once more forward, and into collision with Mr. 
Gladstone, but into no odium of any kind. Indeed he was con- 
siderably less popular at Rome than at home, the more supple 
and less English character of Manning finding greater favour 
with Pius IX. The late seventies, however, were a time of 
triumph for Newman. In 1877 he was elected an Honorary 
Fellow of his own College, Trinity, and next year paid what may 
be called a visit of restoration to Oxford, while in 1879 tne nevv 
Pope Leo XIII. , a man of great abilities and wide piety, raised 
Newman to the cardinalate. He visited Rome on the occasion, 
but returned to Birmingham, where the Edgbaston Oratory was 
still his home for the remaining years of his life. This did not 
end till nth August 1890, when almost all men spoke almost all 
good things over his grave, though some did not spare to inter- 
pose a sober criticism. The books composed during this long 
and eventful career, especially in the first half of it, were very 



NEWMAN 367 



numerous, Cardinal Newman's works at the time of his death, 
and before the addition of Letters, etc., extending to nearly forty 
volumes. Much of the matter of these is still cinis dolosissimus, 
not to be trodden on save in the most gingerly manner in such a 
book as this. Yet there are probably few qualified and impartial 
judges who would refuse Newman, all things considered, the 
title of the greatest theological writer in English during this 
century.; and there are some who uphold him for one of the 
very greatest of English prose writers. It is therefore impossible 
not to give him a place, and no mean place, here. 

Although his chief work, indeed all but a very small part 
of it, was in prose, he was a good verse writer. The beautiful 
poem or hymn usually called from its first words " Lead, 
kindly Light," but entitled by its author " The Pillar of Cloud," 
is not merely as widely known as any piece of sacred verse 
written during the century, but may challenge anything of that 
class (out of the work of Miss Christina Rossetti) for really 
poetical decoction and concoction of religious ideas. It was 
written, with much else, during a voyage in a sailing ship from 
Sicily to Marseilles at the close (June 1833) of that continental 
tour which was of such moment in Newman's life ; and the 
whole batch ferments with spiritual excitement. Earlier, and 
indeed later, Newman, besides plenty of serious verse, con- 
tributed to the Lyra Apostolica or written independently, was a 
graceful writer of verse trifles ; but his largest and best poetical 
work, The Dream of Gerontius, was not produced till he was 
approaching old age, and had long passed the crisis of his 
career. Possibly the new ferment of soul into which the com- 
position of the Apologia had thrown him, may have been 
responsible for this, which is dated a year later. It is the recital 
in lyrical-dramatic form of an anticipatory vision, just before death, 
of the Last Things, and unites dignity and melody in a remarkable 
manner. The. only other parts of his work to which Newman 
himself attached the title " literature " were the prose romances 
of Callista and Loss and Gain. They display his power over 



368 PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY chap. 

language, but are exposed on one side to the charges usually 
incurred by novels with a purpose, and on the other to a 
suspicion of bad taste, incurred in the effort to be popular. 

By far the larger bulk of the works, however, belongs to 
theology. This includes twelve volumes of Sermons, all but a 
small part delivered before Newman's change of creed, and eight 
of them the Parochial and Plain Sermons, preached in the pulpit 
of St. Mary's but not to the University ; four of treatises, including 
the most famous and characteristic of Newman's works except 
the Apologia, The Grammar of Assent, and The Development of 
Christian Doctrine ; four of Essays ; three of Historical Sketches ; 
four theological, chiefly on Arianism, and translations of St. 
Athanasius ; and six Polemical, which culminate in the Apologia. 
With respect to the substance of this work it is soon easy, putting 
controversial matters as much as possible apart, to discover where 
Newman's strength and weakness respectively lay. He was 
distinctly deficient in the historic sense ; and in the Apologia 
itself he threw curious light on this deficiency, and startled even 
friends and fellow-converts, by speaking contemptuously of " anti- 
quarian arguments." The same defect is quaintly illustrated by 
a naif and evidently sincere complaint that he should have been 
complained of for (in his own words) " attributing to the middle 
of the third century what is certainly to be found in the fourth." 
And it is understood that he was not regarded either by Anglican 
or by Roman Catholic experts as a very deep theologian in either 
of his stages. The special characteristic — the ethos as his own 
contemporaries and immediate successors at Oxford would have 
said — of Newman seems to have been strangely combined. He 
was perhaps the last of the very great preachers in English — of 
those who combined a thoroughly classical training, a scholarly 
form, with the incommunicable and almost inexplicable power to 
move audiences and readers. And he was one of the first of that 
class of journalists who in the new age have succeeded the 
preachers, whether for good or ill, as the prophets of the illiterate. 
It may seem strange to speak of Newman as a journalist ; but if 



NEWMAN 369 



any one will read his essays, his Apologia, above all the curious set 
of articles called The Tamworth Reading-Room, he will see what a 
journalist was lost, or only partly developed, in this cardinal. He 
had the conviction, which is far more necessary to a journalist 
than is generally thought-; and yet his convictions were not of 
that extremely systematic and far-reaching kind which no doubt 
often stands in the journalist's way. He had the faculty of mixing 
bad and good argument, which is far more effective with mixed 
audiences than unbated logic. And, little as he is thought of as 
sympathising with the common people, he was entirely free from 
that contempt of them which always prevents a man from gaining 
their ear unless he is a consummately clever scoundrel. 

It may however be retorted that if Newman was a born 
journalist, sermons and theology must be a much better school 
of style in journalism than articles and politics. And it is quite 
true that his writing at its best is of extraordinary charm, while 
that charm is not, as in the case of some of his contemporaries 
and successors, derived from dubiously legitimate ornament and 
flourish, but observes the purest classical limitations of proportion 
and form. It has perhaps sometimes been a little overvalued, 
either by those who in this way or that — out of love for what he 
joined or hate to what he left — were in uncritical sympathy with 
Newman, or by others it may be from pure ignorance of the fact 
that much of this charm is the common property of the more 
scholarly writers of the time, and is only eminently, not specially, 
present in him. But of the fact of it there is no doubt. In such 
a sermon for instance as that on "The Individuality of the Soul," 
a thought or series of thoughts, in itself poetically grandiose 
enough for Taylor or even for Donne, is presented in the simplest 
but in the most marvellously impressive language. The sentences 
are neither volleying in their shortness, nor do they roll 
thundrously ; the cadences though perfect are not engineered 
with elaborate musical art ; there are in proportion very few 
adjectives ; the writer exercises the most extreme continence in 
metaphor, simile, illustration, all the tricks and frounces of literary 



370 PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY chap. 

art. Yet Taylor, though he might have attained more sweetness 
or more grandeur, could hardly have been more beautiful ; and 
though Donne might have been so, it would have been at the 
expense of clearness. Newman is so clear that he has often been 
accused of being, and sometimes is, a little hard ; but this is not 
always or often the case : it is especially not so when he is 
dealing with things which, as in the sermon just referred to and 
that other on "The Intermediate State," admit the diffusion of 
religious awe. The presence of that awe, and of a- constant sense 
and dread of Sin, have been said, and probably with truth, to be 
keynotes of Newman's religious ideas, and of his religious history ; 
but they did not harden, as in thinkers of another temper has 
often been the case, his style or his thought. On the contrary, 
they softened both ; and it is when he is least under the influence 
of them that unction chiefly deserts him. Yet he by no means 
often sought to excite his hearers. He held, as he himself some- 
where says, that " impassioned thoughts and sublime imaginings 
have no strength in them." And this conviction of his can hardly 
be strange to the fact that few writers indulge so little as Newman 
in what is called fine writing. He has " organ passages," but 
they are such as the wind blowing as it lists draws from him, not 
such as are produced by deliberate playing on himself. 

In a wider space it would be interesting to comment on 
numerous other exponents of the Movement. Archdeacon 
afterwards Cardinal Manning (1808-93), tne successful rival of 
Newman among those Anglican clergymen who joined the 
Church of Rome, was less a man of letters than a very astute 
man of business ; but his sermons before he left the Church had 
merit, and he afterwards wrote a good deal. Richard Hurrell 
Froude (1803-36), elder brother of the historian, had a very 
great and not perhaps a very beneficent influence on Newman, 
and through Newman on others ; but he died too soon to leave 
much work. His chief distinguishing note was a vigorous and 
daring humour allied to a strong reactionary sentiment. Isaac 
Williams, the second poet of the Movement (1802-65), was in 



vin MINOR TRACTARIANS 371 

most respects, as well as in poetry, a minor Keble. W. G. 
Ward, commonly called " Ideal " Ward from his famous, very 
ill-written, very ill-digested, but important Ideal of a Christian 
Church, which was the alarm-bell for the flight to Rome, was a 
curiously constituted person of whom something has been said in 
reference to Clough. He had little connection with pure letters, 
and after his secession to Rome and his succession to a large 
fortune he finally devoted himself to metaphysics of a kind. 
His acuteness was great, and he had a scholastic subtlety and 
logical deftness which made him very formidable to the loose 
thinkers and reasoners of Utilitarianism and anti-Supernaturalism. 
One of the latest important survivors was Dean Church (1815-91), 
who, as Proctor, had arrested the persecution of the Tractarians, 
with which it was sought to complete the condemnation of 
Ward's Ideal, and who afterwards, both in a country cure and 
as Dean of St. Paul's, acquired very high literary rank by work 
on Dante, Anselm, Spenser, and other subjects, leaving also 
the best though unfortunately an incomplete history of the 
Movement itself; while the two Mozleys, the one a considerable 
theologian, the other an active journalist, brothers-in-law of 
Newman, also deserve mention. Last of all perhaps we must 
notice Henry Parry Liddon (1829-90), of a younger generation, 
but the right-hand man of Pusey in his later day, and his 
biographer afterwards — a popular and pleasing, though rather 
rhetorical than argumentative or original, preacher, and a man 
very much affected by his friends. Even this list is nothing like 
complete, but it is impossible to enlarge it. 

Midway between the Movement and its enemies, a partial 
sympathiser in early days, almost an enemy when the popular 
tide turned against it, almost a leader when public favour once 
more set in in its favour, was Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford 
and Winchester (1805-73). The third son of the celebrated 
emancipationist and evangelical, he had brothers who were more 
attracted than himself by the centripetal force of Roman doctrine, 
and succumbed to it. Worldly perhaps as much as spiritual 



372 PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY chap. 

motives kept him steadier. He did invaluable work as a 
bishop ; and at all times of his life he was in literature a distinct 
supporter of the High Church cause, though with declensions 
and defections of Erastian and evangelical backsliding. He was 
a very admirable preacher, though his sermons do not read as 
well as they " heard " ; some of his devotional manuals are of 
great excellence ; and in the heyday of High Church allegory 
(an interesting by-walk of literature which can only be glanced 
at here, but which was trodden by some estimable and even 
some eminent writers) he produced the well hit-off tale of Agathos 
(1839). But it may be that he will, as a writer, chiefly survive in 
the remarkable letters and diaries in his Life, which are not only 
most valuable for the political and ecclesiastical history of the 
time, but precious always as human documents and sometimes 
as literary compositions. 

Three remarkable persons must be mentioned among the 
opponents of (and in one case harsh judgment might say the 
deserters of) the Movement. These were Arthur Penrhyn 
Stanley, Mark Pattison, and Benjamin Jowett. Stanley, born in 
1 81 5, was the son of the (afterwards) Bishop of Norwich and a 
nephew of the first Lord Stanley of Alderley, and was brought up 
very much under the influence of Arnold, whose biographer he 
became. But he went further than Arnold in Broad Church 
ways. His career at Rugby and at Oxford was distinguished, 
and after being fellow and tutor of University College for some 
ten years, he became successively Canon of Canterbury, Canon of 
Christ Church, and Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, 
and Dean of Westminster, in which last post he had almost 
greater opportunities than any bishop, and used them to the full. 
He also wrote busily, devoting himself especially to the geo- 
graphy of Palestine and the history of the Eastern Church, which 
he handled in a florid and popular style, though not with much 
accuracy or scholarship. Personally, Stanley was much liked, 
though his conception of his duties as a sworn servant of the 
Church has seemed strange to some. He died in July 1S81. 



MARK PATTISON 373 



Mark Pattison (1813-84), Fellow and Rector of Lincoln 
College, had a less amiable character than Stanley's, but a 
greater intellect and far nicer, profounder, and wider scholarship, 
though he actually did very little. He fell under the influence 
of Newman early, and was one of that leader's closest associates 
in his monastic retreat at Littlemore. But when Newman " went 
over," the wave swept Pattison neither to Rome nor safely on to 
higher English ground, but into a religious scepticism, the exact 
extent of which was nowhere definitely announced, but which 
was regarded by some as nearly total. He did not nominally 
leave the Church, but he acted always with the extreme Liberal 
party in the University, and he was one of the famous Seven who 
contributed to Essays and Reviews} The shock of his religious 
revolution was completed by a secular disappointment — his 
defeat for the office of Rector, which he actually attained much 
later ; and a temper always morbid, appears, to judge from his 
painful but extraordinarily interesting and characteristic Memoirs, 
to have been permanently soured. Even active study became 
difficult to him, and though he was understood to have a more 
extensive acquaintance with the humanists of the late Renaissance 
than any man of his day, his knowledge took little written form 
except a volume on Isaac Casaubon. He also wrote an admirable 
little book on Alilton for the English Men of Letters, edited 
parts of Milton and Pope, and contributed a not inconsiderable 
number of essays and articles to the Quarterly and Saturday 
Reviews, and other papers. The autobiography mentioned was 
published after his death. 

Despite Pattison's peculiar temper he had warm and devoted 
friends, and it was impossible for any one, whether person- 
ally liking him or not, to deny him the possession of most 
unusual gifts. Whether his small performance was due to the 

1 This famous book, published in i860, was a collection of papers by six 
clergymen and a layman, some of which undoubtedly were, and the rest of which 
were by association thought to be, unorthodox. It was condemned by Convoca- 
tion, and actual legal proceedings were taken against two of the writers, but with- 
out final effect. 



374 PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY chap. 

shocks just referred to, to genuine fastidiousness and resolve to 
do nothing but the best, or to these things mixed with a strong 
dash of downright indolence and want of energy, is hard to say. 
But it would be entirely unjust to regard him as merely a man 
who was " going to do something." His actual work though not 
large is admirable, and his style is the perfection of academic 
correctness, not destitute of either vigour or grace. 

There were some resemblances between Pattison and Jowett 
(1817-94) ; but the latter, unlike Pattison, had never had any 
sympathies with the religious renaissance of his time. Like 
Pattison he passed his entire life (after he obtained a Balliol 
fellowship) in his College, and like him became head of it ; while 
he was a much more prominent member of the Liberal party in 
Oxford. His position as Regius Professor of Greek gave him 
considerable influence even beyond Balliol. He, too, was an 
Essayist and Reviewer, and he exercised a quiet but pervading 
influence in University matters. He even acquired no mean 
name in literature, though his work, after an early Commentary 
on some Epistles of St. Paul, was almost entirely confined to 
translations, especially of Plato, and though in these translations 
he was much assisted by pupils. He wrote well, but with much 
less distinction and elegance than Pattison, nor had he by any 
means the same taste for literature and erudition in it. But, as 
an influence on the class of persons from whom men of letters 
are drawn, no one has exceeded him in his day. 

The dramatic catastrophe of the Disruption of the Scotch 
Kirk, which, by a strange coincidence, was nearly contemporary 
with the crisis of the Oxford Movement, set the final seal upon 
the reputation of Thomas Chalmers, who headed the seceders. 
But this reputation had been made long before, and indeed 
Chalmers died 30th May 1847, on ty f° ur y ear s after he "went 
out." He was a much older man than the Oxford leaders, having 
been born in 1780, and after having for some years, though a 
minister, devoted himself chiefly to secular studies, he became 
famous as a preacher at the Tron Church, Glasgow. In 1823 



viii CHALMERS — IRVING 375 

he was appointed Professor of Moral Philosophy at St. Andrews, 
and (shortly afterwards) of Theology in Edinburgh. He was one 
of the Bridgewater treatise writers — a group of distinguished 
persons endowed to produce tractates on Natural Theology — and 
his work, The Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and 
Intellectual Constitution of Man, was one of the most famous of 
that set, procuring for him a correspondence-membership from 
the French Institute and a D.C.L. from Oxford. Chalmers' 
works are extremely voluminous ; the testimony as to the effect 
of his preaching is tolerably uniform ; he was a man of very 
wide range of thought, and of remarkable faculty of popular- 
isation ; and there is no doubt that he was a born leader of men. 
But as literature his works have hardly maintained the reputa- 
tion which they once had, and even those who revere him, un- 
less they let reverence stifle criticism, are apt to acknowledge 
that there is more rhetoric than logic in him, and that the rhetoric 
itself is not of the finest. 

Edward Irving, at one time an assistant to Chalmers, and an 
early friend of Carlyle, was twelve years the junior of Chalmers 
himself, and died thirteen years before him. But at nearly the 
time when Chalmers was at the height of his reputation as a 
preacher in Glasgow, Irving was drawing crowds to the unfashion- 
able quarter of Hatton Garden, London, by sermons of extraor- 
dinary brilliancy. Later he developed eccentricities of doctrine 
which do not concern us, and his preaching has not worn much 
better than that of his old superior. Irving, however, had more 
strictly literary affinities than Chalmers ; he came under the 
influence of Coleridge (which probably had not a little to do both 
with his eloquence and with his vagaries) ; and he may be regarded 
as having been much more of a man of letters who had lost his 
way and strayed into theology than as a theologian proper. 

To what extent this great and famqus influence of Coleridge 
actually worked upon Frederick Denison Maurice has been 
debated. It is however generally stated that he, like his friend 
Sterling, was induced to take orders in the Church of England by 



376 PHILOSOPHY AND THEOLOGY chap. 

this influence. He was not a very young man when in 1834, the 
year of Irving's death, he did this, for he had been born in 1805, 
and had been educated at Cambridge, though being then a Uni- 
tarian he did not take a degree. He afterwards went to Oxford 
and took an M.A. degree there, and he was regarded for a time 
as a sort of outlying sympathiser with the Tractarian Movement. 
But his opinions took a very different line of development not 
merely from those of Newman, but from those of Keble and 
Pusey. He indeed never left the Church, in which he held 
divers preferments ; and though his views on eternal punishment 
lost him a professorship in King's College, London, he met with 
no formal ecclesiastical censure. But he came to be regarded as 
a champion of the Broad Church school, and upheld eloquently 
and vehemently, if not always with a sufficiency either of logic or 
of learning, a curious conglomerate of " advanced" views, ranging 
from Christian Socialism to something like the views of the Atone- 
ment attributed to Origen, and from deprecation of dogma to 
deprecation of the then fashionable political economy. He was 
made Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge in 1866, and 
died in 1872. Maurice's sermons were effective, and his other 
works numerous. A very generous and amiable person with a 
deficient sense of history, Maurice in his writing is a sort of 
elder, less gifted, and more exclusively theological Charles 
Kingsley, on whom he exercised great and rather unfortunate 
influence. But his looseness of thought, wayward eclecticism 
of system, and want of accurate learning, were not remedied 
by Kingsley's splendid pictorial faculty, his creative imagination, 
or his brilliant style. 

Somewhat akin to Maurice, but of a more feminine and less 
robust temperament, was Frederick Robertson, generally called 
" Robertson of Brighton," from the place of his last cure. Robert- 
son, who was the son of a soldier, was born in London on 3rd 
February 1 8 1 6. After a rather eccentric education and some vacil- 
lations about a profession, he went, rather late, to Oxford, and was 
ordained in 1840. He had very bad health, but did duty, chiefly at 



via MINOR THEOLOGIANS 377 

Cheltenham and at Brighton, pretty valiantly, and died on August 
1853. He published next to nothing in his lifetime, but after his 
death there appeared several volumes of sermons which gained 
great popularity, and were followed by other posthumous works. 
Robertson's preaching is not very easy to judge, because the pub- 
lished sermons are admittedly not what was actually delivered, but 
after-reminiscences or summaries, and the judgment is not ren- 
dered easier by the injudicious and gushing laudation of which he 
has been made the subject. He certainly possessed a happy gift 
of phrase now and then, and remarkable earnestness. 

NOTE. — In no chapter, perhaps, has there been greater difficulty as to in- 
clusion and exclusion than in the present. The names of Bishop Christopher 
Wordsworth, of Dean Alford, of Bishop Lightfoot for England, of Bishop Charles 
Wordsworth, of Dean Ramsay, of Drs. Candlish, Guthrie, and Macleod for Scot- 
land, may seem to clamour among orthodox theologians, those of W. R. Greg, of 
James Hinton, of W. K. Clifford among not always orthodox lay dealers with the 
problems of philosophy, or of theology, or both. With less tyrannous limits of 
space Principal Tulloch, who was noteworthy in both these and in pure literature 
as well (he was the last editor of Fraser) , must have received at least brief notice 
in this chapter, as must his brother Principal, J. C. Shairp (an amiable poet, an 
agreeable critic, and Professor of Poetry at Oxford) , in others. 



CHAPTER IX 

LATER JOURNALISM AND CRITICISM IN ART AND LETTERS 

In a former chapter we conducted the history of criticism, 
especially literary criticism, and that chiefly as displayed in the 
periodicals which were reorganized and refreshed in the early 
years of the century, to about 1850. We have now to take it 
up at that point and conduct it — subject to the limitations of 
our plan as regards living authors, and in one extremely important 
case taking the license of outstepping these limits — to the present 
or almost the present day. We shall have to consider the rise 
and performances of two great individual writers, one of whom 
entirely recreated, if he may not almost be said to have created, 
the criticism of art in England, while the other gave a new temper, 
if not exactly a new direction, to the criticism of literature ; and 
we shall have, in regard to periodicals, to observe the rise, in the 
first place of the weekly newspaper, and then of the daily, as 
competitors in strictly critical and literary work with the quarterly 
and monthly reviews, as well as some changes in these latter. 

For just as we found that the first development of nineteenth 
century criticism coincided with or followed upon a new departure 
or development in periodicals, so we shall find that a similar 
change accompanied or caused changes in the middle of the 
century. Although the popularity of the quarterly and monthly 
reviews and magazines which had been headed respectively by 
the Edinburgh and Blackwood did not exactly wane, and though 
some of the most brilliant work of the middle of the century — 

378 



NEW PERIODICALS 379 



George Eliot's novels, Kingsley's and Froude's essays, and the 
like — appeared in them, the ever fickle appetite of readers seemed 
to desire something else in shape, something different in price, 
style, and form. Why this sort of change, which is perpetually 
recurring, should usually bring with it a corresponding change, 
and sometimes a corresponding improvement, of literary produc- 
tion, is more than any one can say, but the fact is not easily 
disputable. 

On the present occasion the change took three successive 
forms — first, the raising, or rather restoring, of the weekly sixpenny 
critical newspaper to a higher pitch of popularity than it had ever 
held ; secondly, the cheapening and multiplying of the monthly 
magazines ; thirdly, the establishment of new monthly reviews, 
somewhat more resembling the old quarterlies than anything else, 
but with signed instead of anonymous articles. 

The uprising of the weekly newspaper took shape in two re- 
markably different forms, represented respectively by Household 
Words, which Dickens started early in the fifties, and by the 
Saturday Review, which came a little later. The former might 
best be described as a monthly of the Blackwood and London kind 
cheapened, made more frequent in issue, and adjusted to a con- 
siderably lower and more popular standard of interest and culture 
— politics, moreover, being ostensibly though not quite really 
excluded. Dickens contributed to it largely himself. He received 
contributions from writers of established repute like Bulwer and 
Lever ; but he made his chief mark with the paper by breeding 
up a school of younger writers who wrote to his own pattern in 
fiction, miscellaneous essay, and other things. Wilkie Collins 
was the chief of these, but there were many others. In particular 
the periodical developed a sort of popular, jocular, and pictur- 
esque-descriptive manner of treating places, travels, ceremonies, 
and what not, which took the public fancy immensely. It was 
not quite original (for Leigh Hunt, Wainewright the murderer- 
miscellanist of the London, some of the Blackwood men, and 
others, had anticipated it to a certain extent), and it was vulgarised 



"7 



380 LATER JOURNALISM AND CRITICISM chap. 

as regards all its models ; but it was distinct and remarkable. 
The aesthetic and literary tone of Household Words, and of its 
successor All the Year Round to a somewhat less extent, was 
distinctly what is called Philistine ; and though Dickens always 
had a moral purpose, he did not aim much higher than amuse- 
ment that should not be morbid, and instruction of the middle- 
class diffusion-of-knowledge kind. But there was very little harm 
and much good to be said of Household Words ; and if some of 
the imitations of it were far from being happy, its own popularity 
and that of its successor were very fairly deserved. 

The aims, the character, and the success of the Saturday 
Review were of the most widely different character. It was less 
novel in form, for the weekly review was an established thing, and 
I had at least two very respectable examples — the Examiner, which 
(under the Hunts, under Fonblanque, under Forster, and under 
the late Mr. Minto) had a brilliant, if never an extremely pros- 
perous, career for three-quarters of the century, and the Spectator, ' 
which attained a reputation for unswerving honesty under the 
editorship of Mr. Rentoul, and has increased it under that of its 
present conductors. But both these were Liberal papers first of 
all; the Saturday Review, at first and accidentally Peelite, was 
really (throughout the nearly forty years during which it remained 
in the possession of the same family and was directed by a suc- 
cession of editors each of whom had been trained under his pre- 
decessor) Independent Tory, or (to use a rather unhappy and now 
half- forgotten name) Liberal-Conservative. It never tied itself to 
party chariot-wheels, and from the first to the last of the period 
just referred to very distinguished writers of Liberal and Radical 
opinions contributed to it. But the general attitude of the paper 
during this time expressed that peculiar tone of mainly Con- 
servative persiflage which has distinguished in literature the great 
line of writers beginning with Aristophanes. Its staff was, as 
a rule, recruited from the two Universities (though there was 
no kind of exclusion for the unmatriculated; as a matter of 
fact, neither of its first two editors was a son either of Oxford or 



ix THE SATURDAY REVIEW 381 

Cambridge), and it always insisted on the necessity of classical 
culture. It eschewed the private personality which had been too 
apt to disfigure newspapers of a satirical kind during the first half 
of the century; but it claimed and exercised to the full the 
privilege of commenting on every public writing, utterance, or 
record of the subjects of its criticism. It observed, for perhaps 
a longer time than any other paper, the salutary principles of 
anonymity (real as well as ostensible) in regard to the authorship 
of particular articles ; and those who knew were constantly amused 
at the public mistakes on this subject. 

Applying this kind of criticism, — perfectly fearless, on the whole 
fairly impartial, informed, human errors excepted, by a rather 
exceptionally high degree of intelligence and education, and 
above all keeping before it the motto, framed by its " sweet 
enemy " Thackeray, of being written " by gentlemen for gentle- 
men," — the Saturday Review quickly attained, and for many 
years held, the very highest place in English critical journalism 
as regards literature, in a somewhat less degree politics, and in a 
degree even greater the farrago of social and miscellaneous mat- 
ters. By consent too general and too unbiassed to be questioned, 
it gave and maintained a certain tone of comment which prevailed 
for the seventh, eighth, and ninth decades of the century, and of 
which the general note may be said to have been a coolly scornful 
intolerance of ignorance and folly. There were those who accused 
it even in its palmiest days of being insufficiently positive and 
constructive ; but on the negative side it was generally sound in 
intention, and in execution admirably thorough. It may some- 
times have mishandled an honest man, it may sometimes have 
forgiven a knave ; but it always hated a fool, and struck at him 
with might and with main. 

The second change began with the establishment of the Corn- 
hill and Macmillan's Magazine, two or three years later. There 
was no perceptible difference in the general scheme of these 
periodicals from that of the earlier ones, of which Blackwood 
and Fraser were the most famous ; but their price was lowered 



382 LATER JOURNALISM AND CRITICISM chap. 

from half a crown to a shilling, and the principle of signed arti- 
cles and of long novels by famous names was adopted. The 
editorship of Thackeray in the Cornhill, with the contributions 
of Matthew Arnold and others, quickly gave a character to it ; 
while Macmillaii's could boast contributions from the Kingsleys, 
Henry and Charles, as well as from many others. From this time 
the monthly magazine, with the exception of Blackwood, found a 
shilling, which attempts have been recently made to lower to 
sixpence, its almost necessary tariff, while the equal necessity of 
addressing the largest possible audience made pure politics, with 
occasional exceptions, unwelcome in it. It is to the credit of the 
English magazines of this class, however, that they have never 
relinquished the tradition of serious literary studies. Many of 
the essays of Mr. Arnold appeared first either in one or the other 
of the two just mentioned ; the Cornhill even ventured upon Mr. 
Ruskin's Unto this Last; and other famous books of a permanent 
character saw the light in these, in Temple Bar, started by Mr. 
Bentley, in the rather short-lived St. Paul's, of which Anthony 
Trollope was editor, and in others. 

Whether the starting of the monthly "Review" as distinguished 
from the " Magazine," which came again a little later towards the 
middle or end of the sixties, be traceable to a parallel popularisa- 
tion of the quarterly ideal — to the need for the political and 
"heavy" articles which the lightened monthlies had extruded — 
or to a mere imitation of the famous French Revue des Deux 
Mondes, is an academic question. The first of these new Reviews 
was the Fortnightly, which found the exact French model unsuit- 
able to the meridian of Greenwich, and dropped the fortnightly 
issue, while retaining the title. It was followed by the Contempo- 
rary, the Nineteenth Century, and others. The exclusion of fic- 
tion in these was not invariable — the Fortnightly, in particular, 
has published many of Mr. Meredith's novels. But, as a rule, 
these reviews have busied themselves with more or less serious 
subjects, and have encouraged signed publication. 

It would, of course, be impossible here to go through all, or 



IX CRITICS AND ESSAYISTS 383 

even all the most noteworthy, of the periodicals of the century. 
We are dealing with classes, not individuals, and the only class yet 
to be noticed — daily newspapers falling out of our ken almost 
entirely — are those weekly newspapers which have eschewed 
politics altogether. The oldest and most famous of these is the 
AthencBum, which still flourishes after a life of nearly seventy 
years, while between forty and fifty years later the Academy was 
founded on the same general principles. But the Athenaicm has 
always cleaved, as far as its main articles went, to the unsigned 
system, while the Academy started at a period which leant the 
other way. Of late years, too, criticism proper, that is to say, of 
letters and art, has played a larger and larger part in daily news- 
papers, some of which attempt a complete review of books as they 
appear, while others give reviews of selected works as full as those 
of the weeklies. If any distinct setting of example is necessary to 
be attributed in this case, the credit is perhaps mainly due to the 
original Pall Mall Gazette, an evening newspaper started in 1864 
with one of the most brilliant staffs ever known, including many 
of the original Saturday writers and others. 

The result of this combined opportunity and stimulus in so 
many forms has been that almost the whole of the critical work 
of the latter part of the century has passed through periodicals — 
that, except as regards Mr. Ruskin, a writer always indocile to 
editing, every one who will shortly be mentioned in this chapter 
has either won his spurs or exercised them in this kind, and 
that of the others, mentioned in other chapters and in connection 
with other subjects, a very small proportion can be said to have 
been entirely disdainful of periodical publication. At the very 
middle of the century, and later, the older Quarterlies were 
supported by men like John Wilson Croker, a survival of their 
first generation Nassau W. Senior, and Abraham Hayward, the 
last a famous talker and "diner-out." Other chief critics and 
essayists, besides Kingsley and Froude, were George Brimley, 
Librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge ; Henry Lancaster, a 
Balliol man and a Scotch barrister ; and Walter Bagehot, a banker, 



384 LATER JOURNALISM AND CRITICISM chap. 

and not a member of either University. Brimley has left us what 
is perhaps the best appreciation of Tennyson in the time between 
the days when that poet was flouted or doubted by the usual critic, 
and those when he was accepted as a matter of course or cavilled 
at as a matter of paradox ; and Lancaster occupies pretty much 
the same position with regard to Thackeray. It is not so easy to 
single out any particular and distinguishing critical effort of 
Bagehot's, who wrote on all subjects, from Lombard Street to 
Tennyson, and from the Coup d'Etat (which he saw) to Browning. 
But his distinction of the poetical art of Wordsworth and that of 
these other poets as " pure, ornate, and grotesque " will suffice to 
show his standpoint, which was a sort of middle place between 
the classical and the Romantic. Bagehot wrote well, and 
possessed a most keen intelligence. Also to be classed here are 
Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh, the very agreeable author of Horce 
Subsecivoz, and James Hannay, a brilliant journalist, a novelist of 
some merit and an essayist of more, and author of A Course of 
English Literature which, though a little popular and desultory, 
is full of sense and stimulus. 

Most popular of all at the time was Sir Arthur Helps (1813- 
75), a country gentleman of some means and of the usual educa- 
tion, who took to a mixed life of official and literary work, did 
some useful work in regard to Spanish-American history, but 
acquired most popularity by a series of dialogues, mostly occupied 
by ethical and aesthetic criticism, called Friends in Council. 
This contains plenty of knowledge of books, touches of wit and 
humour, a satisfactory standard of morals and manners, a certain 
effort at philosophy, but suffers from the limitations of its date. 
In different ways enough — for he was as quiet as the other was 
showy — Helps was the counterpart of Kinglake, as exhibiting a 
certain stage in the progress of English culture during the middle 
of the century — a stage in which the Briton was considerably more 
alive to foreign things than he had been, had enlarged his sphere 
in many ways, and was at least striving to be cosmopolitan, but 
had lost insular strength without acquiring Continental suppleness. 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 385 



Of the literary critic who attracted most public attention during 
this period, — the late Mr. Matthew Arnold, — considerable mention 
has already been made in dealing with his poetry, and biographical 
details must be looked for there. It will be remembered that Mr. 
Arnold was not very early a popular writer either as poet or prose- 
man, that his poetical exercises preceded by a good deal his prose, 
and that these latter were, if not determined, largely influenced by 
his appointment to the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford. He 
began, however, towards the end of the fifties and the beginning 
of the sixties, to be much noticed, not merely as the deliverer of 
lectures, but as the contributor of essays of an exceedingly novel, 
piquant, and provocative kind; and in 1865 these, or some of 
them, were collected and published under the title of Essays in 
Criticism. These Essays — nine in number, besides a character- 
istic preface — dealt ostensibly for the most part, if not wholly, with 
literary subjects, — "The Function of Criticism," "The Literary 
Influence of Academies," " The Gu^rins " (brother and sister), 
" Heine," " Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment," " Joubert," 
" Spinoza," and " Marcus Aurelius," — but they extended the pur- 
port of the title of the first of them in the widest possible way. 
Mr. Arnold did not meddle with art, but he extended the province 
of literature outside of it even more widely than Mr. Ruskin 
did, and was, under a guise of pleasant scepticism, as dogmatic 
within the literary province as Mr. Ruskin in the artistic. It might 
almost be said that Mr. Arnold put himself forth, with a becoming 
attempt at modesty of manner, but with very uncompromising in- 
tentions, as " Socrates in London," questioning, probing, rebuking 
with ironical faithfulness, the British Philistine — a German term 
which he, though not the first to import it, made first popular — in 
literature, in newspapers, in manners, in politics, in philosophy. 
Foreign, and specially French, ways were sometimes directly, 
sometimes obliquely, held up as examples for our improvement ; 
and the want of "ideas," the want of "light," the want of 
" culture," was dwelt on with a mixture of sorrow and satire. 
All this was couched in a very peculiar and (till its mannerism 



386 LATER JOURNALISM AND CRITICISM chap. 

became irritating) a very captivating style, which cannot be 
assigned to any single original, but which is a sort of compound 
or eclectic outcome of the old Oxford academic style as it may 
be seen at times in Newman, of French persiflage, and of some 
elements peculiar to Mr. Arnold himself. The strongest, though 
the most dangerous, of these elements was a trick of iterating 
words and phrases, sometimes exactly, sometimes with a very slight 
variation, which inevitably arrested attention, and perhaps at first 
produced conviction, on the principle formulated by a satirist 
(also of Oxford) a little later in the words — 
What I tell you three times is true. 
But besides and underneath all this flourish, all this wide-ranging 
scatter of sometimes rather hap-hazard arrows, there was a solid 
literary value in Mr. Arnold's method. As has been noticed earlier 
in this chapter, the literary essay of the best kind had somewhat 
gone off in England during the middle of the century, and the 
short, crisp criticisms which had appeared to take its place in 
weekly papers were almost necessarily exposed to grave faults and 
inadequacies. It was Mr. Arnold's great merit that by holding up 
Sainte-Beuve, from whom he had learnt much, and other French 
critics, and by urging successfully the revival of the practice of 
" introducing " editions of classics by a sound biographical and 
critical essay from the pen of some contemporary, he did much 
to cure this state of things. So that, whereas the corpus of 
English essay-criticism between 1800 and 1835 or thereabouts is 
admirable, and that of 1835 t0 ^65 rather thin and scanty, the 
last third of the century is not on such very bad terms as regards 
the first. And he gave example as well as precept, showing — 
though his subjects, as in the case of the Gu6rins, were sometimes 
most eccentrically selected — a great deal of critical acuteness, 
coupled, it may be, with something of critical " will-worship," with 
a capricious and unargued preference of this and rejection of that, 
but exhibiting wide if not extraordinarily deep reading, an honest 
enthusiasm for the best things, and above all a fascinating 
rhetoric. 



MATTHEW ARNOLD 387 



The immediate effect of this remarkable book was good almost 
unmixedly on two of the three parties concerned. It was more 
than time for the flower of middle-class complacency, which 
horticulturists of all degrees, from Macaulay downwards, had 
successively striven to cultivate, and which was already overblown, 
to drop from its stalk ; and the whiff of pleasant scorn which Mr. 
Arnold directed at it was just the thing to puff it off. So the pub- 
lic, upon which he was never likely to produce too much effect, 
had reason to thank him for the effect that he did produce, or 
helped to produce. And on the critics too his effect, or the effect 
of which he was the symptom and voice, was also good, recalling 
them on the one hand from the dulness of the long reviews of 
the period, and on the other from the flippancy of the short, 
while inculcating a wider if not always a sounder comparison. 
Practically German poetry had nothing left to do in Mr. Arnold's 
day, and French had much : he thought just the other way, and 
reserved his encomium of France for its prose, in which it was 
drooping and failing. But this did not matter : it is the general 
scope of the critic's advice which is valuable in such cases, and 
the general scope of Mr. Arnold's was sound. On the third party, 
however, — himself, — the effect was a little disastrous. The re- 
ception which, after long waiting, he had attained, encouraged him 
not so much to continue in his proper sphere of literary criticism 
as to embark on a wide and far- ranging enterprise of general cen- 
sure, which narrowed itself pretty rapidly to an attempt to estab- 
lish undogmatic on the ruins of dogmatic Christianity. It would 
be very improper to discuss such an undertaking on the merits 
here ; or to criticise narrowly the series of singular treatises which 
absorbed (with exceptions, no doubt, such as the quaint sally of 
Friendship's Garland on the occasion of the Franco-German War) 
Mr. Arnold's energies for some fifteen or sixteen years. The titles 
— Culture and Anarchy, God and the Bible, St. Paul and Protes- 
tantism, Literature and Dogma, etc. — are well known. Of the 
contents it is enough to say that, apart from the popular audacity 
of their wit and the interesting spectacle of a pure man of letters 



LATER JOURNALISM AND CRITICISM 



confidently attacking thorny questions without any apparatus of 
special knowledge and study, they have not been generally thought 
quite worthy of their author. There are many brilliant passages 
in these books as writing, just as there are some astonishing lapses 
of taste and logic ; but the real fault of the whole set is that they 
are popular, that they undergo the very curse, of speaking without 
qualification and without true culture, which Mr. Arnold had him- 
self so freely pronounced. 

Fortunately, however, he never quite abandoned the old ways ; 
and in his last years he returned to them almost wholly. Nothing 
better of the kind (individual crotchets always excepted) has ever 
been written than his introductions to selected lives from John- 
son's Poets, to Byron, to Shelley (the most crotchety and unsound 
of all), to Wordsworth (incomparably the best). He aided others ; 
and a collection of his purely or mainly literary work is still eagerly 
expected. Even this would be extremely unequal and open to 
exception here and there. But it would contain some of the very 
best things to be found in any English critic. And this after all, 
if not the absolutely highest, is one of the highest things that can 
be said of a critic, and one of the rarest. Undoubtedly the in- 
fluence of Mr. Arnold did not make for good entirely. He dis- 
couraged — without in the least meaning to do so, and indeed 
meaning quite the contrary — seriousness, thoroughness, scholar- 
ship in criticism. He discouraged — without in the least mean- 
ing to do so, and indeed meaning quite the contrary — simplicity 
and unaffectedness in style. But he was a most powerful stim- 
ulus, and in some ways, if not in all, a great example. Some at 
least of the things he said were in the very greatest need of say- 
ing, and some of the ways in which he said them were inimitably 
charming. 

Contemporary with Mr. Arnold, and his complement in critical 
influence, was John Ruskin, the sole living author of whom it has 
seemed proper to treat here at length, and, since the death of Mr. 
Froude, the sole surviving man of letters of the first class who had 
published before the middle of the century. He was born in 



MR. RUSKIN 389 



18 1 9 : he has given copious accounts of his family, of his youth 
at Denmark Hill, and so forth, and all the world knows that his 
father was a sherry merchant who, though he lived rather plainly, 
was able to give his son an early and plentiful indulgence in that 
Continental travel which had so much to do with developing his 
genius. Mr. Ruskin's education was oddly combined ; for, after 
going to no school, he was sent to Christ Church as a gentleman- 
commoner and took his degree in 1842, having gained the New- 
digate three years earlier. He wrote a good deal of other verse 
in his early years, — and he made himself a not inconsiderable 
draughtsman. But his real vocation was as little the practice 
of art as it was the practice of poetry. As early as 1843 there 
appeared, by " a Graduate of Oxford," the first volume of the 
famous Modern Painters, which ran to five large volumes, which 
covered seventeen years in its original period of publication, 
and which was very largely altered and remodelled by the author 
during and after this period. But Mr. Ruskin by no means 
confined his energies before i860 to this extensive task. The 
Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), and (between 1851 and 
1853) the larger Stones of Venice, did for architecture what the 
companion work did for painting. The Prae-Raphaelite move- 
ment of the middle of the century found in Mr. Ruskin an 
ardent encomiast and literary apostle, and between 1850 and 
i860 he delivered divers lectures, the text of which — Architect- 
ure and Painting (1854), Political Economy of Art (1858) — was 
subsequently published in as elaborately magnificent a style as 
his other works. As Modem Painters drew to its close he became 
prolific of more numerous and shorter works, generally with some- 
what fantastic but agreeable titles — Unto this Last ( 1 86 1), Munera 
Pulveris (1862), Sesame and Lilies (1865), The Cestus of Aglaia 
(1865), The Ethics of the Dust (1866), The Crown of Wild Olive 
(1866), Time and Tide by Wear and Tyne (1867), The Queen of 
the Air (1869), Aratra Pentelici and The Eagle's Nest (1872), 
Ariadne Florentina (187 3) , Proserpina and Deucalion (1875 sea.), 
St. Mark's Pest and Prceterita (1885). Not a few of these were 



390 LATER JOURNALISM AND CRITICISM chap. 

issued in parts and numbers, but Mr. Ruskin's bulkiest and most 
characteristic venture in this kind was Fors Clavigera, which was 
published at irregular intervals from 1871 to 1884. He has written 
many other things even in book form, besides innumerable essays 
and letters, some of which have been collected in two gatherings — 
Arrows of the Chace and On the Old Road. 

Two things are mainly perceptible in this immense and at first 
sight rather bewildering production. The first, the most disput- 
able and probably the least important, though the most at the 
author's heart, is a vast, fluctuating, but on the whole pretty 
coherent body of doctrine in reference to Art. Up to Mr. 
Ruskin's day, aesthetics had been little cultivated in England, and 
such handlings of the subject as existed — Burke's, Adam Smith's, 
Alison's, and a few others — were of a jejune and academic char- 
acter. Even writers of distinct literary genius and of great taste 
for the matter, who had not resided abroad long, such as Hazlitt, 
much more such as Charles Lamb and Hartley Coleridge, betray 
the want of range and practice in examples. Even the valuable 
and interesting work of Mrs. Jameson (1 794-1860) was more 
occupied with careful arrangement and attractive illustration 
than with original theory ; and, well as she wrote, her Character- 
istics of Shakespeare's Women (1832) is perhaps more important as 
literature than the series of volumes — Sacred and Legendary Art, 
etc. — which she executed between 1845 and her death. The 
sense of the endless and priceless illustration of the best art 
which was provided by Gothic domestic and ecclesiastical archi- 
tecture was only wakening ; as for painting, the examples publicly 
visible in England were very few, and even private collections 
were mostly limited to one or two fashionable schools — Raphael 
and his successors, the later Low Country schools, the French 
painters in the grand style, and a few Spaniards. 

Strongly impressed by the Romantic revival (he has all his life 
been the staunchest of Sir Walter's devotees), a passionate lover 
of Gothic architecture both at home and abroad, and early drawn 
both to the romantic nature-painting of Turner and the gorgeous 



MR. RUSKIN 391 



colouring of the early Italian schools, Mr. Ruskin heralded Art 
with a passion of which eighteenth century "gusto" had had no 
notion. But he was by no means satisfied with heralding Art 
alone. Anathematising at once the doctrine that utility is beauty 

— that beauty is utility he would always have cheerfully admitted 

— and the doctrine that the beautiful is not necessarily connected 
either with utility, with goodness, or with truth, he from the first 
and to the last has endeavoured to work ethics and aesthetics into 
a sort of single texture of warp and woof respectively, pushing his 
endeavours into the most multiform, the most curious, and it must 
be owned sometimes the most grotesque ramifications and ex- 
tremities. But he was not satisfied with this bold attempt at the 
marriage of two things sometimes deemed hostile to, and generally 
held to be independent of, one another. He must needs be bolder 
still, and actually attempt to ally with Art, if not to subject to her, 
the youngest, the most rebellious, and, as it might seem, the most 
matter-of-fact and utilitarian of all the sciences — that of Political 
Economy. As we have seen, he had brought the subjects together 
in lectures pretty early in his career, and he developed the com- 
bination further in the eccentric book called Unto this Last, 
originally published in the Cornhill Magazine as noted above. In 
this ^Esthetics and Economics combined took a distinctly Socialist 
turn ; and as England was under the very fullest dominion of the 
Liberal middle-class regime, with its belief in laissez-faire and in 
supply-and-demand, Mr. Ruskin was not a little pooh-poohed. It 
would be improper here to attack or to defend his views, but it is 
part of the historian's duty to say that, for good or for ill, they 
have, though in forms different from his and doubtless by no means 
always meeting his approval, made constant headway, and that 
much legislation and still more agitation on the extreme Liberal 
side, and not there only, may be said to represent, with very slight 
transformation, Ruskinian doctrine applied, now and then, to very 
anti-Ruskinian purposes. 

With regard to aesthetics proper, it might be contended, with- 
out too much rashness, that the history of Ruskinism has not been 



392 LATER JOURNALISM AND CRITICISM chap. 

different ; but to some observers it seems to have described rather 
a curve than a steady ascent. After being, between 1840 and i860, 
laughed at, despised, attacked all at once, Mr. Ruskin found his 
influence as an art teacher rise steadily during the seventh decade 
of the century, and attain its highest point about the close 
thereof, when he was made Slade Professor in his own university, 
and caused young Oxford to do many fantastic things. But, as 
always happens, the hour of triumph was the hour, not, perhaps, 
of downfall, but of opposition and renegation. Side by side with 
Mr. Ruskin's own theories had risen the doctrine of Art-for-Art's 
sake, which, itself as usual half truth and half nonsense, cut at 
the very root of Ruskinism. On the other hand, the practical 
centre of art-schools had shifted from Italy and Germany to 
Paris and its neighbourhood, where morality has seldom been able 
to make anything like a home ; and the younger painters and 
sculptors, full of realism, impressionism, and what not, would 
have none of the doctrines which, as a matter of fact, stood in 
immediate relationship of antecedence to their own. Lastly, it 
must be admitted that the extreme dogmatism on all the sub- 
jects of the encyclopedia in which Mr. Ruskin had seen fit to 
indulge, was certain to provoke a revolt. But with the substance 
of Ruskinism, further than is necessary for comprehension, we are 
not concerned. 

Yet there are not many things in the English nineteenth 
century with which a historian is more concerned than with the 
style of the deliverance of these ideas. We have noticed in 
former chapters — we shall have to notice yet more in the con- 
clusion — the attempts made in the years just preceding and 
immediately following Mr. Ruskin's birth, by Landor, by De 
Quincey, by Wilson, and by others in the direction of ornate, of — 
as some call it — flci7nboyant English prose. All the tendencies 
thus enumerated found their crown and flower in Mr. Ruskin 
himself. That later the crowns and the flowers were, so to speak, 
divided, varied, and multiplied by later practitioners, some of 
whom will presently be noticed, while more are still alive, is quite 



MR. RUSKIN 393 



true. But in 1895 it is not very unsafe to prophesy that the 
flamboyant style of the nineteenth century will be found by 
posterity to have reached its highest exposition in prose with 
Mr. Ruskin himself. 

Like all great prose styles — and the difference between prose 
and poetry here is very remarkable — this was born nearly full 
grown. The instances of comparison in those who have tried 
both harmonies are rare ; those in poets only are delusive and 
uncertain. But with the three greatest poets of England who 
have also been great prose writers, Milton, Dryden, Shelley, the 
assertion that the distinctive quality of their prose developed itself 
earlier than the distinctive quality of their verse is only disputable 
in the case of Milton. And Milton, as it happened, wrote prose 
and verse in manners more nearly approaching each other than 
any one on record. Mr. Ruskin ha's not been a poet, except 
in extreme minority ; but he has been a great prose writer from 
the first. It is almost inconceivable that good judges can ever 
have had any doubt about him. It is perfectly — it is, indeed, 
childishly easy to pick faults, even if matter be kept wholly out 
of sight. In Mr. Ruskin's later books a certain tendency to con- 
versational familiarity sometimes mocks those, and not those only, 
who hold to the tradition of dignified and ex cathedra pronounce- 
ment ; in his earlier, and in all, it is possible for Momus to note 
an undue floridness, an inclination to blank verse in prose, 
tricks and manners of this or that kind unduly exuberant and 
protuberant. 

But when all these things have been allowed for to the very 
fullest, what an enormous advance there is on anything that had 
gone before ! The ornate prose writers of the seventeenth century 
had too frequently regarded their libraries only ; they had seldom 
looked abroad to the vast field of nature, and of art other than 
literary art. The ornate writers of the eighteenth, great as they 
were, had been as afraid of introspection as of looking outwards, 
and had spun their webs, so far as style and ornament were con- 
cerned, of words only. Those of the early nineteenth had been 



394 LATER JOURNALISM AND CRITICISM chap. 

conscious of revolt, and, like all conscious revolters, had not 
possessed their souls in sufficient quietness and confidence. 
Landor, half a classic and half a Romantic, had been too much 
the slave of phrase, — though of a great phrase. Wilson, impatient 
in everything, had fluctuated between grandeur and galimatias, 
bathos and bad taste ; De Quincey, at times supreme, had at 
others simply succumbed to "rigmarole." Mr. Ruskin had a gift 
of expression equal to the best of these men ; and, unlike them, 
he had an immense, a steady, a uniform group of models before 
him. Indulge as he might in extravagance, there were always 
before him, as on a vastly extended dais set before the student, 
the glories of nature and of art, the great personalities and pro- 
ductions of the great artists. He had seen, and he could see 
(which is a different thing), the perennial beauties of mountain 
and cloud, of tree, and sea, and river ; the beauties long, if not 
perennial, of architecture and painting. A man may say foolish 
things, — Mr. Ruskin has said plenty ; but when he has Venice 
and Amiens and Salisbury, the Alps and the Jura and the 
PJfine, Scott and Wordsworth, Turner and Lionardo, always 
silently present before his mind's eye, he can never, if he is a man 
of genius, go wholly wrong. And he can never go more than a 
little wrong when he is furnished by his genius with such a gift of 
expression as Mr. Ruskin has had. 

For this gift of expression was such as had never been seen 
before, and such as, for all the copying and vulgarising of it, has 
never been seen since. It is a commonplace of literary history 
that description, as such, is not common or far advanced in the 
earlier English prose. We find Gray, far on in the eighteenth 
century, trying to describe a sunrise, and evidently vexed at the 
little " figure it makes on paper." Then the tourists and the 
travellers of the end of that age made valiant but not always 
well directed efforts to induce " it " to make a figure on paper. 
Then came the experts or student-interpreters in ornate prose 
who have been mentioned. And then came Mr. Ruskin. 
" Never so before and never quite so since," must be the re- 



MR. RUSKIN 395 



peated verdict. The first sprightly runnings in these, as in other 
kinds, are never surpassed. Kingsley, an almost contemporary, Mr. 
Swinburne, a younger rival, have come near; others have done 
creditably in imitation ; none have equalled, and certainly none 
have surpassed. Let the reader read the " Wave Studies " in the 
first volume of Modern Painters, more than fifty years old ; the 
" Pine Forest in the Jura," almost forty; the "Angel of the Sea," 
fully thirty-five, and say, if he has any knowledge of English litera- 
ture, whether there had been anything like any of these before. 
Shelley, perhaps, in some of his prose had gone near it. Shelley 
was almost as great a prose writer as he was a poet. No one else 
could even be mentioned. 

Nor was it mere description, great as Mr. Ruskin is in that, 
which differentiated him so strongly. He is a bad arguer; but 
his arguments are couched in rhetoric so persuasive that the very 
critics who detect his fallacies would almost consent to forfeit the 
power of detecting, if they could acquire that of constructing, such 
delightful paralogisms. His crotchets of all sorts are sometimes 
merely childish, and not even always or very often original ; for, 
like all fertile minds, he never could receive any seed of thought 
from another but it bore plant and fruit at once. But the state- 
ment of them is at its best so captivating that weaklings may 
pardonably accept, and strong men may justly tolerate, the worth- 
less kernel for the sake of the exquisite husk. Few men have less 
of the true spirit of criticism than Mr. Ruskin, for in his enthu- 
siasm he will compass sea and land to exalt his favourite, often 
for reasons which are perfectly invalid ; and in his appreciation he 
is not to be trusted at all, having a feminine rather than a mascu- 
line faculty of unreasoned dislike. But praise or blame, argue or 
paralogise as he may, the golden beauty of his form redeems his 
matter in the eyes of all but those who are unhappy enough not 
to see it. 

That his influence has been wholly good no one can say. 
There is scarcely a page of him that can be safely accepted on the 
whole as matter, and the unwary have accepted whole volumes ; 



396 LATER JOURNALISM AND CRITICISM chap. 

his form is peculiarly liable to abuse in the way of imitation, and 
it has actually been abused to nausea and to ridicule. But this is 
not his fault. There is so little subtlety about Mr. Ruskin that 
he can hardly deceive even an intelligent child when he goes 
wrong. There is so much genius about him that the most 
practised student of English can never have done with admiration 
at the effects that he produces, after all these centuries, with the 
old material and the old tools. He is constantly provocative of 
adverse, even of severe criticism ; of half the heresies from which 
he has suffered — not only that of impressionism — he was himself 
the unconscious heresiarch. And yet the more one reads him 
the more one feels inclined almost to let him go uncriticised, 
to vote him the primacy in nineteenth-century prose by simple 
acclamation. 

Richard (or as his full name ran), John Richard Jefferies, 
occupies, though an infinitely smaller and a considerably lower 
place than Mr. Ruskin's, yet one almost as distinctly isolated in 
a particular department of aesthetic description. The son of a 
farmer at Coate, in North Wiltshire, and born in November 
1848, he began journalism at eighteen, and was a contributor to 
the North Wilts Herald till he was nearly thirty. Then he went 
to London, and in 1878 published some sketches (previously con- 
tributed to the Pall Mall Gazette) under the title of The Game- 
Keeper at Home. These, though not much bought, were very 
much admired ; and Jefferies was encouraged to devote himself 
to work of the same kind, which he varied with curious and not 
very vigorous semi-philosophic speculations and attempts at 
downright novels (a kind which he had also tried in his youth). 
Unfortunately the peculiar sort of descriptive writing in which he 
excelled was not very widely called for, could hardly under the 
most favourable circumstances have brought in any great sums 
of money, and was peculiarly liable to depreciate when written to 
order. It does not appear that Jefferies had the rare though 
sometimes recorded power of accommodating himself to ordinary 
newspaper hack-work, while reserving himself for better things now 



ix JEFFERIES 397 

and then ; and finally, he had not been long in London before 
painful and ultimately fatal disease added to his troubles. He 
died in August 1887, being not yet forty. A burst of popularity 
followed ; his books, The Game- Keeper at Home, Wild Life in a 
Southern Country, The Amateur Poacher, Round about a Great 
Estate, etc., none of which had been printed in large numbers, 
were sold at four or five times their published price ; and, worst 
of all, cheap imitations of his style began to flood the newspapers. 
Nay, the yet later results of this imitation was that another reaction 
set in, and even Jefferies' own work was once more pooh-poohed. 
The neglect, the over-valuation, and the shift back to injustice, 
were all examples of the evils which beset literature at the present 
time, and which the much-blamed critic is almost powerless to 
cause or cure. In other days Jefferies was quite as likely to have 
been insufficiently rewarded at first by the public ; but he would 
then have had no temptation to over-write himself, or try alien 
tasks, and he would have stood a very good chance of a pension, 
or a sinecure, or an easy office in church or state, on one or other 
of which he might have lived at ease and written at leisure. 
Nothing else could really have been of service to him, for his 
talent, though rare and exquisite, was neither rich nor versatile. 
It consisted in a power of observing nature more than Words- 
worthian in delicacy, and almost Wordsvvorthian in the presence 
of a sentimental philosophic background of thought. Unluckily 
for Jefferies, his philosophic background was not like Words- 
worth's, clear and cheerful, but wholly vague and partly gloomy. 
Writing, too, in prose not verse, and after Mr. Ruskin, he at- 
tempted an exceedingly florid style, which at its happiest was 
happy enough, but which was not always at that point, and which 
when it was not was apt to become trivial or tawdry, or both. 
It is therefore certain that his importance for posterity will 
dwindle, if it has not already dwindled, to that given by a bundle 
of descriptive selections. But these will occupy a foremost place 
on their particular shelf, the shelf at the head of which stand 
Gilbert White and Gray. 



398 LATER JOURNALISM AND CRITICISM chap. 

Mr. Arnold, it has been said, abstained almost entirely from 
dealing with art. Mr. Ruskin, who has abstained from dealing 
with nothing, did not abstain from criticism of literature, but his 
utterances in it have been more than usually obiter dicta. Yet 
we must take the two together if we are to understand the most 
powerful influence and the most flourishing school of criticism, 
literary and other, which has existed for the last thirty years. 
This school may be said to halt in a way between purely literary 
and generally aesthetic handling, and when it can to mix the two. 
Most of its scholars — men obviously under the influence both of 
Arnold and of Ruskin, either in submission or in revolt, are alive, 
and we reason not of them. But, as it happens, the two most 
famous, one of whom was a prose writer, pure and simple, the 
other a copious artist in prose and verse, have died recently and 
call for judgment. These were Walter Horatio Pater and John 
Addington Symonds. 

The first-named was born in 1839, and went to Oxford, where 
he was elected to a fellowship at Brasenose. He spent the whole 
of the rest of his life either at that college or in London, practis- 
ing no profession, competing for no preferment, and for many 
years at least producing literature itself with extreme sparing- 
ness. It was in 1873 that Mr. Pater first collected a volume 
of Studies in the History of Renaissance, which attracted the 
keenest attention both as to its manner and as to its mat- 
ter. The point of view, which was that of an exceedingly re- 
fined and carefully guarded Hedonism, was in a way and at least 
in its formulation novel. Mr. Pater did not meddle with any 
question of religion ; he did not (though there were some who 
scented immorality in his attitude) offend directly any ethical 
prejudice or principle. But he laid it down explicitly in some 
places, implicitly throughout, that the object of life should be 
to extract to the utmost the pleasure of living in the more 
refined way, and expressly and especially the pleasure to be 
derived from education and art. The indebtedness of this both 
to the Arnoldian and Ruskinian creeds, its advance (in the 



PATER 



599 



main a legitimate advance) on the former, and its heretical devia- 
tion from the development of the latter, require no comment. 
But this propaganda, if so violent a word may be used, of Mr. 
Pater's placid creed, called to aid a most remarkable style — a style 
of the new kind, lavish of adjective and the mot de lumiere, but 
not exceedingly florid, and aiming especially at such an arrange- 
ment of the clause, the sentence, and the paragraph, such a 
concerted harmony of cadence and symphony, as had not been 
deliberately tried before in prose. The effects which it produced 
on different tastes were themselves sufficiently different. Some 
found the purport too distasteful to give a dispassionate attention 
to the presentment ■ others disliked the manner itself as formal, 
effeminate, and " precious." But there were others who, while 
recognising the danger of excess in this direction, thought and 
think that a distinct and remarkable experiment had been made 
in English prose, and that the best examples of it deserved a place 
with the best examples of the ornater styles at any previous time 
and in any other kind. 

Mr. Pater was not tempted by such popularity as his book 
received to hasten publication ; indeed it was understood that 
after beginning to print a second collection of Essays, he became 
dissatisfied with them, and caused the type to be broken up. 
But the advance of so-called ^Estheticism was too strong an 
invitation, and prepared for him too large and eager an audience, 
so that the last decade of his life saw several books, Marius the Epi- 
cicrean, Imaginary Portraits, Appreciations, while others appeared 
posthumously. Of these the first-named is unquestionably the 
best and most important. Although Greek had been the indis- 
pensable — almost the cardinal — principle in Mr. Pater's own 
literary development, he had been so strongly affected by modern 
thought and taste, that he could hardly recover a dispassionate 
view of the older classics. Imaginary Portraits, an attempt at 
constructive rather than critical art, required qualities which 
he did not possess, and even made him temporarily forget his 
impeccable style : Appreciations, good in itself, was inferior to 



4 oo LATER JOURNALISM AND CRITICISM chap. 

the first book. But Marius the Epicurean far excelled all these. 
It, too, took the form of fiction, but the story went for so little in 
it that deficiencies therein were not felt. The book was in effect a 
reconstruction, partly imaginative, but still more critical, of a period 
with which Mr. Pater was probably more in sympathy than with 
any other, even the Renaissance itself, to wit the extremely 
interesting and strangely modern* period when classicism and 
modernity, Christianity and Paganism, touched and blended in the 
second century after Christ after the fashion revealed to us in the 
works of Apuleius most of all, of Lucian to some extent, and of a 
few others. Mr. Pater indeed actually introduced the philosopher- 
novelist of Madaura in the book, though he was not the hero; 
and his own peculiar style proved itself admirably suited to the 
period and subject, whether in description and conversation, or 
in such translation or paraphrase as that of the famous and 
exquisite Pervigilium Veneris. 

For this style, however, in perfection we must still go back to 
the Studies of the Renaissance, which is what Mr. Arnold liked 
to call a point de repere. The style, less exuberant, less 
far-reaching and versatile, and, if any one pleases to say 
so, less healthy than Mr. Ruskin's, is much more chastened, 
finished, and exquisite. It never at its best neglects the differ- 
ence between the rhythm of prose and the metre of verse ; 
if it is sometimes, and indeed usually, wanting in simplicity, 
it is never overloaded or gaudy. The words are picked ; but 
they are seldom or never, as has been the case with others, not 
only picked but wrenched, not only adjusted to a somewhat 
unusual society and use, but deliberately forced into uses and 
societies wholly different from those to which readers are accus- 
tomed. Above all, no one, it must be repeated, has ever surpassed, 
and scarcely any one has ever equalled Mr. Pater in deliberate and 
successful architecture of the prose-paragraph — in what may, for 
the sake of a necessary difference, be called the scriptorial in oppo- 
sition to the oratorical manner. He may fall short of the poetic 
grandeur of Sir Thomas Browne, of the phantasmagoric charm of 



SYMONDS 401 



De Quincey at his rare best, of the gorgeous panoramas of Mr. 
Ruskin. But his happiest paragraphs are like flamboyant chan- 
tries, not imposing, not quite supreme in quality, but in their own 
kind showing wonderful perfection of craftsmanship. 

Of the same school, though a less exact and careful practitioner 
in it, was John Addington Symonds, who was born in Bristol ' on 
the 5th of October 1840, and died at Rome on 19th April 1893. 
He was the son of a famous doctor whose name figures often in 
literary history, inasmuch as he made Clifton a frequent resort for 
persons of consumptive tendencies. Mr. Symonds himself lived 
there for a great part of his life. Unfortunately the disease which 
his father had combated revenged itself upon him ; and it was only 
by spending the greater part of his later years at Davos that he 
staved it off as long as he did. Educated at Harrow and at 
Balliol, a Fellow of Magdalen, and succeeding tolerably young to 
an affluent fortune, Mr. Symonds was able to indulge his tastes, 
literary and other, pretty much as he chose. The result was for- 
tunate in one way, unfortunate in another. He could hardly have 
made a living by literature, in which though an eager worker he 
was a thorough dilettante. But if he had been at less liberty to 
write what and howsoever he pleased, he might or rather would 
have been obliged to compress and chasten the extreme prolixity 
and efflorescence of his style. 

His largest work, the History of the Renaissance in Italy, is 
actually one of great value in information, thought, and style ; 
but its extreme redundance cannot be denied, and has indeed 
already necessitated a sort of boiling down into an abstract. Both 
in prose essays (which he wrote in great numbers, chiefly on 
Greek or Renaissance subjects) and in verse (where he was not so 
successful as in prose) Mr. Symonds was one of the most character- 
istic and copious members of the rather foolishly named " aesthetic " 
school of the last third of the century, the school which, originally 
deriving more or less from Mr. Ruskin, more and more rejected the 
ethical side of his teaching. But Mr. Symonds, who had been very 
much under the influence of Professor Jowett, had philosophical 



4 02 LATER JOURNALISM AND CRITICISM chap. 

velleities, which have become more generally known than they 
once were through the interesting biography published after his 
death by Mr. Horatio Brown. But for the redundance above 
mentioned, which is all pervading with him both in thought and 
style, and which once suggested to a not unfriendly critic the re- 
mark that he should like " to squeeze him like a sponge," Symonds 
would probably or rather certainly occupy a much higher place than 
he has held or ever will hold. For his appreciation both of books 
and of nature was intense, and his faculty of description abundant. 
But the ventosa et enormis loquacitas of his style was everywhere, 
so that even selection would be hard put to it to present him really 
at his best. 

William Minto, who was born in 1846 and died in 1893, 
Professor of Logic and English Literature at Aberdeen, showed 
fewer marks of the joint direction of " aesthetic " criticism to 
art and letters than these two, and had less distinct and 
original literary talent. He had his education mainly at 
Aberdeen itself, where he was born and died ; but he made 
a short visit to Oxford. Subsequently taking to journalism, 
he became editor of the Examiner, and considerably raised the 
standard of literary criticism in that periodical, while after quitting 
it he wrote for some time on the Daily News. His appointment 
to the professorship enabled him to devote himself entirely to 
literature, and he produced some novels, the best of which was 
The Crack of Doom. He had much earlier executed two extremely 
creditable books, one on English Prose, and one on part of the His- 
tory of English verse, the only drawbacks to which were a rather 
pedagogic and stiff arrangement ; he was a frequent contributor 
to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and after his death some of his 
professorial Lectures on the Georgian era were published, but 
without his final revision. The strongest side of Minto's criticism 
lay in his combination of sufficiently sound and wide knowledge 
of the past with a distinct and rather unusual sympathy with the 
latest schools of literature as they rose. He was untainted by 
the florid style of his day, but wrote solidly and well. If it were 



ix MINTO 403 

necessary to look for defects in his work they would probably be 
found in a slight deficiency of comparative estimate, and in a 
tendency to look at things rather from the point of view of modern 
than from that of universal criticism. But this tendency was not 
in him, as it so often is, associated with ignorance or presumptuous 
judgment. 



CHAPTER X 

SCHOLARSHIP AND SCIENCE 

The remarks which were made at the beginning of the chapter 
on Philosophy and Theology apply with increasing force to the 
present chapter; indeed, they need to be restated in a much 
more stringent and exclusive form. To give some history of 
English philosophy and theology in the nineteenth century, by 
noticing its literary expression, was possible, though it had to be 
done, so to speak, in shorthand. To do the same thing with 
science, or even with what is technically called scholarship, would 
be simply impossible. Much of their expression is hardly 
susceptible of literary form at all, hardly any ever receives such 
form, while the subdivision of the branches of physical science is 
now so great and their shadow so wide that no systematic sketch 
of them is to be thought of. It is only possible to mention a few 
distinguished writers, writers who would have been distinguished 
whatever their subject, but who happen to have devoted them- 
selves, solely or mainly, to scientific writing, or to classical criticism 
and philology. 

A curious independent study might be made of the literary 
gradations of classical scholarship. In the Middle Ages, though 
the complete ignorance of the classics, once imagined as pre- 
vailing, has been shown to be a figment, scarcely anybody could 
claim to be a scholar. During the Renaissance almost every man 
of letters had necessarily some tinge of scholarship, and some of 
the greatest in its earlier period, such as Erasmus, were scholars 

404 



OLDER SCHOLARS 405 



first of all. The growth of vernacular literature, the constant 
increase and subdivision of subjects, and the advance in 
minute study of the Greek and Latin languages, brought about 
an inevitable cleavage, and from the seventeenth century onwards 
scholarship became an independent profession or vocation. For 
some considerable time, however, it was the almost indispensable 
novitiate of a literary career, and the tradition that a scholar must 
be first applied to, for no matter what literary work, was still potent 
in the times of Salmasius, and cannot be said to have been 
discredited in those of Bentley, who would undoubtedly have 
been as formidable in purely political or general controversy as 
he was on Phalaris or on his own private interests. The 
eighteenth century, however, saw the divorce nearly completed, and 
by the period of our present volume it was an accomplished fact. 

Even then, however, though for men of letters it was not 
customary to turn first to scholars, scholars had not ceased to be 
men of letters, and philology (or the mere study of language, as 
apart from literature) had not absorbed them. 

During that part of our period which is still concerned with 
the last century, there were many excellent scholars in England, 
but perhaps only three — two of whom as scholars were of no great 
account — who make much figure in purely literary history. Jacob 
Bryant (1 715-1804), an odd person of uncritical judgment but 
great learning, who belongs more to the last volume than to the 
present, devoted himself chiefly to mythology, a subject which had 
not yet attracted general interest, and which was treated by him 
and others in a somewhat unhistorical manner. Gilbert Wakefield 
( 1 756-1801) was one of the characteristic figures of the Revolu- 
tionary time. He was a Cambridge man, and took orders, but 
left the church, became a violent Jacobin, and went to prison for a 
seditious libel. He was one of those not very uncommon men 
who, personally amiable, become merely vixenish when they write : 
and his erudition was much more extensive than sound. But he 
edited several classical authors, not wholly without intelligence 
and scholarship, and his Silva Critica, a sort of variorum 



4 o6 SCHOLARSHIP AND SCIENCE chap. 

commentary from profane literature on the Bible, was the 
forerunner, at least in scheme, of a great deal of work which 
has been seen since. 

A very different person from these in scholarly attainments, in 
natural gifts, and (it must unfortunately be added) in personal 
respectability, was Richard Porson, who is generally bracketed with 
Bentley as the greatest of English scholars, not of our own day, 
and who might have been one of the most brilliant of men of 
letters. He was born in Norfolk on Christmas Day 1759, of low 
station, but was well educated by the parson of the parish, and 
sent to Eton by a neighbouring squire. In 1779 ne went to Trinity 
College, Cambridge, obtained a scholarship, did brilliantly in Uni- 
versity contests and became fellow in 1 782. Although he was almost 
a boy the genius of his papers in scholarship attracted notice at 
home and abroad, and he made some excursions into general liter- 
ature wherein, as in his recorded conversations, he showed epi- 
grammatic wit of the first rank. He lost his fellowship because he 
would not take orders ; but was made Regius Professor of Greek, 
an appointment which unluckily was then, in both Universities, 
almost honorary as regards income. The Whig party accepted his 
partisanship, but had no opportunity of rewarding it, and after receiv- 
ing the Librarianship of the London Institution in Moorfields, he 
died of apoplexy in 1808. He possessed in almost the highest 
degree that power of divination, based on accurate knowledge, 
which distinguishes the scholar, and it is, as has been said, nearly 
certain that he would have been a brilliant writer in English on 
any subject he chose to take up. But he was a hopeless drunkard, 
an offensive sloven, rude and aggressive in society — in short a 
survival of the Grub Street pattern of the century of his birth. 
This period, which was that of Burney, Elmsley, Gaisford, and 
other scholars, robust but not very literary (except in the case 
of Elmsley, who was a contributor both to the Edinburgh and 
the Quarterly Reviews), was succeeded by one in which 
the English Universities did not greatly distinguish them- 
selves in this department. Gaisford indeed lived till 1855 at 



CONINGTON 407 



Oxford, and Cambridge produced among other respectable 
scholars the already mentioned Maiden and George Long 
(1800-79), a Lancashire man, who went to Trinity, distin- 
guished himself greatly, but found such preferment as he met 
with outside his university, in America, at University College, 
London, and elsewhere. Long was a great diffusion-of-useful- 
knowledge man, and edited the Penny Cyclopedia: but he did 
more germane work later in editing the Bibliotheca Classica, an 
unequal but at its best excellent series of classics, and in dealing 
with the great stoics Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus. He was 
also one of the mainstays of the most important enterprise of 
the middle of the century in classical scholarship, the Classical 
Dictionaries edited by the late Sir William Smith and published 
by Mr. Murray ; and he wrote an extensive but not extraordinarily 
valuable Decline of the Roman Republic. Long appears to have 
been one of those men who, with great ability, vast knowledge, 
and untiring industry, somehow or other miss their proper place, 
whether by fault or fate it is hard to say. 

About i860 three remarkable persons illustrated scholarship 
in the Universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh re- 
spectively, with a combination of literary and linguistic knowledge 
which had been growing rarer up to their time, and which has 
grown rarer still since. 

The Oxford representative was John Conington, who was born 
at Boston on 10th August 1825. He went to Rugby and to Mag- 
dalen College, Oxford, whence he migrated to University College, 
and there obtained a fellowship, making nearly a clean sweep of 
the chief University prizes meanwhile. He became in 1854 the 
first Professor of Latin, and held the post till his death in 1869. 
He edited Virgil, ^Eschylus (part) and Persius, translated Horace, 
Homer, and Virgil, and did a certain amount of miscellaneous 
literary work. He was neither a very exact nor a very great 
scholar : his scholarship indeed took rather the character of that 
of foreign nations, other than Germany, than the dogged minute- 
ness of German, or the large but solid strength of English study 



4 o8 SCHOLARSHIP AND SCIENCE CHAP. 

of the classics. But he was an exceedingly stimulating professor ; 
and coming 'at the time when it did, his work was valuable as a 
reminder that the classics are live literature, and not so much 
dead material for science. 

Hugh Andrew Johnstone Munro, a native of Elgin, where he 
was born in 1819, a Shrewsbury boy and a scholar and fellow 
of Trinity College, Cambridge, who became Professor of Latin 
there in 1869 and died in 1882, was an incomparably greater 
verbal scholar than Conington, and may fairly be said to have 
taken up the torch of Bentley and Porson. His great edition 
(with a less great translation) of Lucretius, his work on Horace 
and Catullus, and his scattered papers, all come up to a very high 
standard ; and in the delightful art of Greek and Latin composi- 
tion in verse, where England has long stood paramount, and 
which, since she has abandoned it, remains uncultivated through- 
out Europe, he was almost supreme. But Munro, though he 
never surrendered wholly to the philological heresy, was affected 
thereby ; and some of his Lucretian readings were charged with a 
deficiency in ear such as that with which he justly reproached 
his German predecessors. 

The most strictly literary of the three has yet to be men- 
tioned. William Young Sellar, born near Golspie in the same 
year as Conington, was educated at the Edinburgh Academy, at 
the University of Glasgow, and (as a Snell exhibitioner) at Balliol. 
After holding an Oriel fellowship for some years, and doing 
professorial or assistant-professorial work at Durham and St. 
Andrews, he became in 1863 Professor of Humanity at Edin- 
burgh, and remained so till his death in 1890. In the year of 
his election to the professorship appeared his Roman Poets of the 
Republic, quite the best book of its kind existing in English ; and 
this was followed up by others on Virgil, Horace, Tibullus, and 
Propertius — good, but less good, the mannered correctness of the 
Augustans evidently appealing to the author less than the more 
strictly poetic excellence of Lucretius and Catullus. Attempts, too 
few but noteworthy, have since been made to handle classical 



x SELLAR — ROBERTSON SMITH 409 

literature in the style of the Roman Poets of the Republic, but 
it has never been surpassed, and it has very seldom been 
equalled. 

On another scheme and in other circumstances names like 
those of Kennedy and Shilleto, of Linwood and Burges, of Monk 
and Blomfield, would cry for admission here, but as it is they 
must be ruled out. And it is not possible to widen the scope 
much, so as to take in some eminent students who have given 
not unliterary expression to the study of languages and subjects 
other than the classical. It has indeed been a constantly in- 
creasing feature of the century that fresh studies — /Egyptology, 
the study of the Semitic languages, the study of the older forms 
not merely of English but of the other modern tongues, the 
enormous range of knowledge opened to Englishmen, and as 
it were forced on them by our possession of India and our com- 
merce and connection with other nations of the East, as well as 
the newer subjects of comparative mythology, folk-lore, and the 
like, all more or less offshoots of what may be generally termed 
scholarship, have been added to the outer range of the Humanities. 
Some of these appeal to very few, none of them to more than 
few persons ; and literature, in its best description if not exactly 
definition, is that which does or should appeal to all persons 
of liberal education and sympathies. Yet one exponent of these 
studies (and of more than one of them) must have a place 
here, as well for the more than professionally encyclopaedic 
character of his knowledge as for his intellectual vigour and his 
services to letters. 

William Robertson Smith was born in 1846, and died in 
1894. A native of Aberdeenshire, the son of a Free Kirk 
minister, and educated at Aberdeen and elsewhere, he became 
Professor of Hebrew in the Free Church College of that city, and 
for some years discussed his subject, in the manner of the 
Germans, without hindrance. His articles in the Encyclopaedia 
Britannica, however, gave offence, and after much controversy he 
was deprived of his chair in 1881. Two years later, however, he 



4 io SCHOLARSHIP AND SCIENCE chap. 

was made Lord Almoner's Professor of Arabic at Cambridge, 
where he also became Fellow of Christ's and University Librarian. 
And from a contributor he proceeded to be first assistant-editor 
and then editor in chief of the Encyclopaedia. His health, never 
very strong, became worse and worse, and he finally succumbed 
to a complication of diseases. It was understood that the 
theological scandal connected with his name was anything but a 
pleasure to him, and the justice of it does not concern us ; but 
his repute as an Orientalist is uncontested. Besides works 
directly bearing on the Bible, he wrote two important books 
on Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia and on The Religion 
of the Semites. He was at least as remarkable for general as for 
special learning, and if not actually a great man of letters, had a 
knowledge of literature rivalled by few of his contemporaries. 

To turn to physical science, Sir Humphry Davy, a great 
chemist and no mean writer, was born at Penzance in December 
1778. His father was a wood-carver, but he himself was ap- 
prenticed to a surgeon-apothecary, and betook himself seriously 
to chemistry. Fortunately for him, Dr. Beddoes, the father of 
the poet, a physician of great repute at Clifton, took him to be 
his assistant there, and Davy, in his twentieth year, not only had 
much improved opportunities of study, but made valuable friends, 
both among the persons of rank who then frequented Clifton for 
health, and among the literary society of which Coleridge and 
Southey were then the ornaments in Bristol. This part of his 
sojourn was noteworthy for his experiments with nitrous oxide 
("laughing gas"). These attracted a great deal of attention, 
and in 1801, being then barely twenty-three, he was appointed to 
a lectureship in the Royal Institution, London. His appointment 
was the beginning of a series of brilliant lectures in the same 
place during almost the whole of the century, first by Davy 
himself, then by his assistant Faraday, and then by Faraday's 
assistant Tyndall. He was knighted in 18 12, and soon after- 
wards married Mrs. Apreece, a lively, pretty, and wealthy widow. 
His later years were occupied, first by the investigations which 



x DAVY 411 

led to the perfecting of his famous safety-lamp for coal-mines 
(these brought him a handsome testimonial and a baronetcy), and 
later by electrical researches. He had not reached middle age 
when his health began to fail, and he died in 1829, aged little 
more than fifty. In connection with literary science or scientific 
literature Davy was perhaps more remarkable as a lecturer than 
as a writer, but his accomplishments as the latter were consider- 
able, and in his later years he wrote two non-scientific books, 
Salmonia and Consolations in Travel. These (though the former 
was attacked as the work of an amateur and a milksop by 
Christopher North) were very popular in their day. Davy always 
kept up his friendship with men of letters, especially the Lake 
Poets and Scott (who was a connection of his wife's), and he was 
no very small man of letters himself. 

A contemporary (though very much longer lived) of Davy's 
and the most famous Englishwoman who has ever written on 
scientific subjects, was Mary Fairfax, better known from the name 
of her second husband as Mrs. Somerville. She was born at 
Jedburgh on 26th December 1780, and when twenty-four married 
her cousin, Captain Greig, a member of a family of Scotchmen 
who had settled in the Russian navy. Her first husband died 
two years afterwards, and six years later she married Dr. William 
Somerville, also her cousin. She had already devoted much 
attention, especially during her widowhood, to mathematics and 
astronomy ; and after her second marriage she had no difficulty 
in pursuing these studies. She adapted Laplace's Mecanique 
Celeste in 1823, and followed it up by more original work on 
physics, astronomy, and physical geography. Her life was pro- 
longed till 1872, and an interesting autobiography appeared a 
year later. It is possible that Mrs. Somerville profited somewhat 
in reputation by her concidence with the period of " diffusion of 
useful knowledge." But she had real scientific knowledge and 
real literary gifts ; and she made good use of both. 

Of at least respectable literary merit, though hardly of enough to 
justify the devoting of much space to them here, were Sir David 



412 SCHOLARSHIP AND SCIENCE chap. 

Brewster ( 1 78 i-i 868) , Sir John Herschel ( 1 79 2-1 8 7 1 ) , Sir Charles 
Lyell(i797-i875), Sir Roderick Murchison (1 792-1871), the first 
a mathematician and physicist, the second an astronomer, the third 
and fourth geologists, and all more or less copious writers on their 
several subjects. John Tyndall (1 820-1 893), a younger man than 
any of these, had perhaps a more distinctly literary talent. Born 
in Ireland, and for some time a railway engineer, he gave himself 
up about 1847 t0 th e study and teaching of physics, was remark- 
able for the effect of his lecturing, and held several Govern- 
ment appointments. His Presidential Address to the British 
Association at Belfast in 1874 was not less noteworthy for 
materialism in substance than for a brilliant if somewhat brassy 
style. 

But the chief Englishmen of science who were men of 
letters' during our period were Charles Darwin and Thomas 
Huxley. The opinions of the first of these, their origin, the 
circumstances of their first expression, and the probabilities of 
their future, have been the subject of about as much controversy 
as in a given time has been bestowed upon, any subject, certainly 
on any similar subject. But we enjoy here the privilege of neg- 
lecting this almost entirely. Darwin is to the literary historian a 
very interesting subject, for he was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin, 
who himself, besides being the capital example of the polished 
mediocrity of eighteenth century verse when all freshness had gone 
out of it, was a man of science and an evolutionist in his way. 
Charles (who was also christened Robert) was the son of yet another 
Dr. Darwin, an F.R.S. He was born on 12th February 1809 at 
Shrewsbury, and his mother was (as was afterwards his wife) a 
daughter of the Wedgwoods of Etruria. After passing through 
the famous school of his native town, Darwin went to Edinburgh 
for some years and then entered Christ's College, Cambridge, in 
1828. Here he devoted himself to physical science, and after 
taking his degree was, in 1831, appointed to the Beagle, which 
was starting on a scientific cruise. He spent five years in the 
South Seas and did not return to England till late in 1836 — a 



DARWIN 413 



voyage which perhaps prejudicially affected his health, but es- 
tablished his knowledge of nature. After his return he settled 
down to scientific work, alone and in the scientific societies, 
married in 1839, and was busy for many years afterwards in 
publishing the results of the voyage. He possessed considerable 
means, and for the last forty years of his life lived at his ease at 
Down near Beckenham, experimenting in crossing species and 
maturing his views. These took form, under circumstances 
interesting but foreign to our theme, in the famous Origin of 
Species, published in 1859, and this was followed by a great 
number of other books, the most noteworthy of which, if not the 
scientifically soundest, was The Descent of Man (1871). Darwin 
died after many years of continuous ill-health on 19th April 1882. 
Late in life he is said to have confessed that his relish for 
Shakespeare and for pure literature generally, which had in earlier 
days been keen, had entirely vanished. But there was perhaps 
nothing very surprising in this, seeing that he had for half a 
century given himself up with extraordinary and ever-increasing 
thoroughness to a class of investigations the most remote possible 
from literature, and yet not, as pure mathematical study not 
seldom induces its votaries, inducing men to cultivate letters 
by mere contrast. Yet the ancestral literary tendency had 
only fallen dormant in him then ; and earlier it had been active. 
It can indeed hardly be said that either his contribution to the 
Voyage of the Beagle, or The Origin of Species, or The Descent of 
Man, or any of the others, is absolutely remarkable for style in 
the ordinary sense of that phrase. The style of Darwin attempts 
no ornateness, and on the other hand it is not of those extremely 
simple styles which are independent of ornament and to which 
ornament would be simply a defacement. But it is very clear ; it 
is not in the least slovenly ; and there is about it the indefinable 
sense that the writer might have been a much greater writer, 
simply as such, than he is, if he had cared to take the trouble, and 
had not been almost solely intent upon his matter. Such writers 
are not so common that they should be neglected, and they may 



414 SCHOLARSHIP AND SCIENCE chap. 

at least stand in the Court of the Gentiles, the "provincial band " 
of literature. 

A very remarkable book which was in a way Darwinism before 
Darwin, which attracted much attention and violent opposition in 
1S44, the year of its publication, and which for a long time 
remained unowned, was the Vestiges of Creation, subsequently 
known to be the work of Robert Chambers, the younger of two 
brothers who did great things in the popular publishing trade at 
Edinburgh, and who founded a house which has always been 
foremost in the diffusion of sound and cheap literature, informa- 
tion, and amusement. Robert was born at Peebles in 1802 and 
died at St. Andrews in 1871, having been, besides his publishing 
labours, a voluminous author and compiler. Nothing he did 
was quite equal to the Vestiges, a book rather literary than 
scientific, and treating the still crude evolution theory rather from 
the point of view of popular philosophy than from that of strict 
biological investigation ; but curiously stimulating and enthusiastic, 
with a touch of poetry in it not often to be found in such books, 
and attractive as showing the way in which doctrines which are 
about to take a strong hold of the general mind not infrequently 
communicate themselves, in an unfinished but inspiring form, to 
persons who, except general literary culture and interest, do not 
seem to offer any specially favourable soil for their germination. 
Purely scientific men have usually rather pooh-poohed the Vestiges, 
but there is the Platonic quality in it. 

The Vestiges, like its more famous successor, was violently 
attacked as irreligious. One of its opponents, from a point of 
view half orthodox and half scientific, was Hugh Miller, a man of 
sterling excellence, of an interesting and in its close melancholy 
career, of real importance as a geologist, and possessed of an 
extremely agreeable literary faculty. Miller was born at Cromarty 
in 1802, and though more than fairly educated, held till he was 
past thirty no higher position than that of a stone-mason. He 
had begun to write, however, earlier than this, and, engaging in 
particular in the two rather dissimilar subjects of geology and 



x HUGH MILLER — HUXLEY 415 

" Free Kirk " polemic, he was made editor of the Witness, a news- 
paper started- in the interest of the new principles. After nearly 
twenty busy years of journalism and authorship he shot himself in 
December 1856, as it is supposed in a fit of insanity brought on 
by overwork. Miller was a very careful observer, and his Old 
Red Sandstone (1S41) made a great addition to the knowledge of 
fossils. He followed this up by a great number of other works, 
some merely polemical, others descriptive of his own life and 
travels. In all the better parts of Hugh Miller's writings there is 
a remarkable style, extremely popular and unpretentious but never 
trivial or slipshod, which is not far below the best styles of the 
century for its special purpose, though in some respects it smacks 
more of the eighteenth, and has a certain relation with that of 
White of Selborne. 

The most considerable literary gifts of the century among men 
of science probably belonged to a man more than twenty years 
younger than Miller, and more than fifteen younger than Darwin, 
who died so recently that until the greater part of this book was 
written it seemed that he would have no place in it. Thomas 
Henry Huxley, born in May 1825, at Ealing, studied medicine, 
and becoming a navy doctor, executed like Darwin a voyage to 
the South Seas. His scientific work, though early distinguished, 
met with no great encouragement from the Admiralty, and he left 
the service, though he held many public appointments in later 
life. He became F.R.S. at six-and-twenty, and from that time 
onwards till his sixtieth year he was a busy professor, lecturer, 
member of commissions, and (for a time) inspector of fisheries. 
In the ever greater and greater specialising of science which has 
taken place, Huxley was chiefly a morphologist. But outside the 
range of special studies he was chiefly known as a vigorous 
champion of Darwinism and a something more than vigorous 
aggressor in the cause of Agnosticism (a word which he himself did 
much to spread), attacking supernaturalism of every kind, and 
(though disclaiming materialism and not choosing to call himself an 
atheist) unceasingly demanding that all things should submit them- 



4i 6 SCHOLARSHIP AND SCIENCE chap, x 

selves to naturalist criticism. A great number of brilliant essays 
and lectures were composed by him on different parts of what may 
be called the debateable land between science, philosophy, and 
theology. And one of his most characteristic and masterly single 
studies was a little book on Hume, contributed to the series 
of " English Men of Letters " in 1879. 

This varied, copious, and brilliant polemic may or may not 
have been open in substance to the charge which the bolder and 
more thoroughgoing defenders of orthodoxy brought against it, 
that it committed the logical error of demanding submission on 
the part of supernaturalism to laws and limits to which, by its very 
essence, supernaturalism disclaimed allegiance. But the form of 
it was excellent. Mr. Huxley had read much, and had borrowed 
weapons and armour from more than one Schoolman and Father 
as well as from purely profane authors. He had an admirable 
style, free alike from the great faults of his contemporaries, 
" preciousness " and slipshodness, and a knack of crisp but not too 
mannered phrase recalling that of Swift or, still more, of Bentley. 
It has been said, with some truth as well as with some paradox, 
that a literary critic of the very first class was lost in him, at 
the salvage only of some scientific monographs, which like all 
their kind will be antiquated some day, and of some polemics 
which must suffer equally from the touch of time. 



CHAPTER XI 



DRAMA 



At no period, probably, in the history of English literature, from 
the sixteenth century until that with which we are now dealing, 
would it have been possible to compress the history of the drama 
during a hundred years into the space which it is here proposed to 
give it. If we were dealing with the works of living men the his- 
torian might be justly charged with arrogant incompetence in not 
taking more notice of them. But, fortunately, that is not the case ; 
and the brevity of the treatment is equally compatible with a belief 
that the plays of the present day are masterpieces, and with a sus- 
picion that they are not. As to the past we have, with the excep- 
tion of a few protesters, general consent that the English drama of 
the nineteenth century has displayed one curious and disastrous 
characteristic. The plays, as a rule, which have been good litera- 
ture have either never been acted or have seldom succeeded as 
plays ; the plays that have been acted and have been successful 
have seldom been good literature. 

The best idea of the state of the drama between 1790 and 
1 8 10 may perhaps be obtained by any one who cares to look 
through — it would require a monomania, a desert island, or at 
least a succession of wet days in a country inn to enable any one 
to read through — the ten volumes of Mrs. Inchbald's Modern 
British Theatre, printed in 181 1 "from the prompt-books of the 
Theatres Royal." This publication, supplementing the larger 

2E 417 



41 8 DRAMA chap. 

British Theatre of the same editor, contains more than two 
volumes of the works of Frederick Reynolds, a prolific playwright 
who was responsible for the English version of Werther in drama ; 
another of Mrs. Inchbald's own writing and adaptation ; one of 
Holcroft's later works ; one of Cumberland's ; and the other five 
made up of lesser pieces by Colman the younger, Dibdin, and 
others, serious plays in blank verse such as Hannah More's 
Percy, and the Honourable John St. John's Mary Queen of Scots, 
etc. More than one of these was a person of talent, more than 
one a person even of very great talent ; while Holcroft and 
Colman, if not others, had displayed special ability for drama. 
Yet there is, perhaps, in the fifty plays of the ten volumes only 
one that can be called a good play, only one which is readable, 
and that is the Trip to Scarborough, which Sheridan simply adapted, 
which he did little more than edit, from Vanbrugh's Relapse. 
Outside these volumes the acting drama of the period may be best 
studied in the other and better work of the pair just mentioned, 
and in O'Keefe. 

John O'Keefe, or O'Keeffe (for the name is spelt both ways), 
was a very long-lived man, who was born at Dublin in 1 748 and 
died at Southampton in 1833. But in the later years of his 
life he suffered from blindness ; and the period of his greatest 
dramatic activity almost exactly coincided with that of our first 
chapter. He is said to have written some fifty pieces, of various 
kinds, between 1781 and 1798 ; and in the latter year he published 
a collection of about thirty, referring in the preface to others which 
"an inconsiderate disposal of the copyright" prevented him from 
including. O'Keefe was to a certain extent a follower of Foote ; but 
his pieces — though he was a practised actor — depended less upon 
his own powers of exposition than Foote's. They range from rather 
farcical comedies to pure farces and comediettas much interspersed 
with songs for music ; and their strictly literary merit is not often 
great, while for sheer extravagance they require the utmost license 
of the boards to excuse them. There is, however, something 
much more taking in them than in most of the dramatic work of 



JOANNA BAILLIE 419 



the time. For instance, the " wild farce " (referred to but not 
named by Lamb in his paper on Munden) of The Merry Mourners, 
though as "improbable" as Mrs. Barbauld thought The Ancient 
Mariner to be, has a singular hustle and bustle of sustained 
interest, and not a few shrewd strokes such as the following, 
which perhaps does not only apply to the end of the eighteenth 
century. " Your London ladies are so mannified with their switch 
rattans and coats, and watch-chain nibbities, and their tip-top 
hats and their cauliflower cravats, that, ecod ! there's no mark of 
their being women except the petticoat." The Castle of Anda- 
lusia (1782) is an early and capital example of the bandit 
drama, and The Poor Soldier of the Irish comic opera. Wild 
Oats supplied favourite parts to the actors of the time in 
Rover and Ephraim Smooth ; and, with a little good will, one 
may read even slight things like A Beggar on Horseback and 
The Doldrum with some amusement. But O'Keefe has few gifts 
beyond knowledge of the stage, Irish shrewdness, Irish rattle, and 
an honest, straightforward simplicity ; and that one turns to him 
from other dramatists of the period with some relief, is even more 
to their discredit than to his credit. 

A curious and early fruit of this gradual divorce between drama 
and literature was Joanna Baillie, a lady whose virtues, amiability, 
and in a way talents, caused her to be spoken of by her own con- 
temporaries with an admiration which posterity has found it hard 
to echo as concerns her strictly literary position in drama — some 
of her shorter poems were good. She was born in 1762 at Both- 
well, of a good Scotch family, and her mother was a sister of the 
great surgeon Hunter. This gift descended to her elder brother 
Matthew, who was very famous in his own day as an anatomist 
and physician. Partly to be near him, Joanna and her sister 
Agnes established themselves at Hampstead, where she often 
entertained Scott and other great people, and where she lived till 
23rd February 1851. In 1798 she published the first of a series of 
Plays on the Passions, in which the eighteenth century theory of the 
ruling passion was carried out to the uncompromising and even 



420 DRAMA chap. 

whimsical extent of supplying a brace of dramas, a tragedy and a 
comedy, on each of the stronger passions, Hatred, Fear, Love, etc. 
The first volume, which opened with the rather striking closet drama 
of Basil, sometimes spoken of as Count Basil, was prefaced by 
an introductory discourse of considerable ability. The book, com- 
ing at a dead season of literature, was well received. It reached 
its third edition in the second year from its appearance, and one of 
its plays, De Montfort, was acted, with Kemble in the title part, not 
without success. A second volume followed in 1802, and a third in 
18 1 2. In 1804 one of Miscellaneous Plays had been issued, while 
others and some poems were added later. Joanna's plays in general, 
it was admitted, would not act (though the Ettrick Shepherd in 
the Nodes Ambrosiance denies this), and it requires some effort to 
read them. The blank verse of the tragedies, though respectable, 
is uninspired ; the local and historical colour, whether of Byzantine, 
Saxon, or Renaissance times, is of that fatal " property " character 
which has been noticed in the novel before Scott ; and the passion- 
scheme is obviously inartistic. The comedies are sometimes gen- 
uinely funny ; but they do not display either the direct and fresh 
observation of manners, or the genial creation of character, which 
alone can make comedy last. In short Miss Baillie was fortunate 
in the moment of her appearance, but she cannot be called either 
a great dramatist or a good one. 

The school of Artificial Tragedy — the phrase, though not a 
consecrated one, is as legitimate as that of artificial comedy — 
which sprung up soon after the beginning of this century, and 
which continued during its first half or thereabouts, if not later, 
is a curious phenomenon in English history, and has hardly yet 
received the attention it deserves. The tragedy of the eighteenth 
century is almost beneath contempt, being for the most part 
pale French echo or else transpontine melodrama, with a few 
plaster-cast attempts to reproduce an entirely misunderstood 
Shakespeare. It was impossible that the Romantic movement in 
itself, and the study of the Elizabethan drama which it induced, 
should not lead to the practice of tragedy, while the existence of 



xi NINETEENTH CENTURY TRAGEDY 421 

the Kembles as players and managers, might be thought to 
promise well for the tragic stage. 

Yet there has always been something out of joint with English 
nineteenth century tragedy. Of Lamb's John Woodvil and God- 
win's Antonio mention has been made. Byron's tragedies are 
indeed by no means the worst part of his work ; but they also 
shared the defects of that work as poetry, and they were not 
eminently distinguished for acting qualities. Scott had no dra- 
matic faculty ; Shelley's Cenci, despite its splendid poetry, is not 
actable ; indeed the only one of the great English nineteenth 
century Pleiade who was successful on the stage was Coleridge ; 
and Remorse and Zapolya are not masterpieces. 

Yet the fascination of the theatre, or at least of the drama, 
seemed to continue unaltered, and the attempts on or in it varied 
from the wild fantasy pieces of Beddoes (which no stage but the 
Elizabethan — if even that — could ever have welcomed) to the 
curious academic drama of which types extend not merely from 
Milman's Fazio in 1815 to Talfourd's Ion twenty years later, but 
further still. Of Milman notice has been taken in his far truer 
vocation as historian. Talfourd was a good lawyer, a worthy man, 
and as noted above, the friend and editor of Lamb. But his 
tragedies are very cold, and it is difficult to believe that Ion 
can have had any other attraction besides the popularity and 
skill of Macready, who indeed was greatly responsible for the 
appearance both of this and of better plays. In particular he 
stood usher to divers productions of Browning's which have 
been mentioned, such as the rather involved and impossible 
Strafford, and the intensely pathetic but not wholly straight- 
forward Blot in the 'Scutcheon. This last is the one play of the 
century which — with a certain unsubstantiality of matter, a de- 
fect almost total in character, and a constant provocation to the 
fatal question, "Why are all these people behaving in this way?" 
— has the actual tragic vis in its central point. 

The character, however, and the condemnation of the English 
drama of the first half of this century from the literary point of 



422 DRAMA chap. 

view, are summed up in the single statement that its most promi- 
nent and successful dramatist was James Sheridan Knowles. Born 
in 1 784, and son of the great Sheridan's cousin at Cork, Knowles 
was introduced to London literary society pretty early. He tried 
soldiering (at least the militia) and medicine ; but his bent towards 
the stage was too strong, and he became an actor, though never 
a very successful one, and a teacher of acting, though never a 
manager. He was about thirty when he turned dramatist, and 
though his plays justify the theatrical maxim that no one who 
has not practical knowledge of the stage can write a good acting 
play, they also justify the maxim of the study that in his day 
literary excellence had in some mysterious way obtained or suf- 
fered a divorce from dramatic merit. Not that these plays are 
exactly contemptible as literature, but that as literature they are 
not in the least remarkable. The most famous of his tragedies 
is Virginius, which dates, as performed in London at least, from 
1820. It was preceded and followed by others, of which the 
best are perhaps Cains Gracchus (1815), and William Tell 
(1834). His comedies have worn better, and The Hunchback 
(1832), and the Love Chase (1836), are still interesting examples 
of last-century artificial comedy slightly refreshed. Independently 
of his technical knowledge, Knowles really had that knowledge of 
human nature without which drama is impossible, and he could 
write very respectable English. But the fatal thing about him 
is that he is content to dwell in decencies for ever. There is 
no inspiration in him ; his style, his verse, his theme, his char- 
acter, his treatment are. all emphatically mediocre, and his tech- 
nique as a dramatist deserves only a little, though a little, warmer 
praise. 

Better as literature, and at least as good as drama, are the best 
plays of the first Lord Lytton, another of the eminent hands of 
Macready, who undoubtedly counted for something in the suc- 
cess of The Lady of Lyons, Richelieu, and Money, the two first 
produced in 1S38, and the last in 1S40. Richelieu is the nearest 
to Knowles in competence without excellence, the other two 



BULWER — PLANCH E 423 



perhaps excel if not positively yet relatively. Many spectators 
quite recently, while unable to check laughter at the grandiloquent 
sentimentality and the stock situations of The Lady of Lyons, have 
been unable to avoid being touched by its real though ordinary 
pathos, and moved by its astonishing cleverness ; while Money is 
probably the very best comic example of the hybrid kind above 
referred to, the modernised artificial comedy. But Bulwer's other 
plays, though the unsuccessful Ducliesse de la Valliere is not bad 
reading, were less fortunate, and one of them is the subject of 
perhaps the most successful of Thackeray's early reviews in the 
grotesque style, preserved in the Yellowplush Papers. 

It will be observed that, with the single and not very notable 
exception of Sheridan Knowles, almost all the names already 
mentioned are those of persons to whom drama was a mere by- 
work. Another exception may be found in James R. Planche 
(1796-1S80), a man of no very exalted birth or elaborate educa- 
tion, but an archaeologist of some merit, and from 1854 onwards 
an official representative of the honourable though discredited 
science of Heraldry as Rouge Croix Pursuivant and Somerset 
Herald. From 18 18 onward Planche was the author, adapter, 
translator, and what not, of innumerable — they certainly run to 
hundreds — dramatic pieces of every possible sort from regular 
plays to sheer extravaganzas. He was happiest perhaps in the 
lighter and freer kinds, having a pleasant and never vulgar style 
of jocularity, a fair lyrical gift, and the indefinable knowledge of 
what is a play. But he stands only on the verge of literature 
proper, and the propriety, indeed the necessity, of including him 
here is the strongest possible evidence of the poverty of dramatic 
literature in our period. It would indeed only be possible to extend 
this chapter much by including men who have no real claim to 
appear, and who would too forcibly suggest the hired guests of 
story, introduced in order to avoid a too obtrusive confession of 
the absence of guests entitled to be present. 

The greater and more strictly literary names of those who 
have tried the stage in the intervals of happier studies, from Miss 



424 DRAMA chap, xi 

Mitford and R. H. Home to Tennyson, have been mentioned 
elsewhere ; and there is no need to return to them. Dr. James 
Westland Marston (1820-90) was once much praised, and was 
an author of Macready's. Miss Isabella Harwood, daughter of 
the second editor of the Saturday Review, produced under the 
pseudonym of " Ross Neil " a series of closet-dramas of excellent 
composition and really poetical fancy, but wanting the one thing 
needful. Perhaps a few other writers might with pains be 
added ; and of course every reviewer knows that the flow of 
five-act tragedies, though less abundant than of old, has con- 
tinued. But, on the whole, the sentence already put in more 
than one form remains true and firm — that in this period the 
dramatic work of those who have been really men and women 
of letters is generally far inferior to their other work, and that, 
with the rarest exceptions, the dramatic work of those who have 
not excelled in other kinds of literature is not literature at all. 



CHAPTER XII 



CONCLUSION 



A conclusion which avows that it might almost as well have 
presented itself as a preface may seem to be self-condemned ; 
it must be the business of the following pages to justify it. In 
summing up on such a great matter as this it is desirable — it is 
indeed necessary — to indicate, in broader lines than at the mere 
outset would have seemed appropriate or indeed possible, the 
general course of thought and of speech, of literary matter and 
literary form, during the century and more which is submitted 
to the view. We can thus place individuals in their position to 
each other and to the whole more boldly and with less reserve ; 
we can sketch the general character of existing movements, the 
movers in which have been exempt from individual consideration 
by virtue of their life and work being incomplete ; we can at 
once record accomplishment and indicate tendency. 

The period dealt with in the first chapter of this book 
illustrates the differences in appeal of such periods to the merely 
dilettante and " tasting " critic, and to the student of literature 
in the historical and comparative fashion. To the former it 
is one of the most ungrateful of all such sub-periods or sub- 
divisions in English literature. He finds in it none, or at most 
Boswell's Johnson, Burns, and the Lyrical Ballads (this last at 
its extreme end), of the chief and principal things on which 
alone he delights to fix his attention. Its better poetry, such as 
that of Cowper and Crabbe, he regards at best with a forced 

425 



426 CONCLUSION 



esteem ; its worse is almost below his disgust. Its fiction is 
preposterous and childish ; it contributes nothing even to the 
less " bellettristic " departments of literature that is worth his 
attention ; it is a tedious dead season about which there is 
nothing tolerable except the prospect of getting rid of it before 
very long. 

To the latter — to the historical and comparative student — on 
the other hand, it has an interest of an absolutely unique kind. As 
was observed in a former volume of this history, the other great 
blossoming time of English literature — that which we call Eliza- 
bethan, and by which we mean the last five and twenty years 
of the Queen's reign and the fifty or sixty after her death — was 
preceded by no certain signs except those of restless seeking. 
Here, on* the contrary, with no greater advantage of looking back, 
we can see the old fruit dropping off and the new forming, in a 
dozen different kinds and a hundred different ways. Extrava- 
gance on one side always provokes extravagance on the other ; 
and because the impatient revolt of Coleridge and some others 
of the actual leaders into the Promised Land chose to present the 
eighteenth century as a mere wilderness in respect of poetry, en- 
joyment of nature, and so forth, there have been of late years 
critics who maintained that the poetical decadence of that century 
is all a delusion ; in other words (it may be supposed) that Aken- 
side and Mason are the poetical equals of Herrick and Donne. 
The via media, as almost always, is here also the via veritatis. 
The poets of the eighteenth century were poets ; but the poetical 
stream did not, as a rule, run very high or strong in their 
channels, and they were tempted to make up for the sluggishness 
and shallowness of the water by playing rather artificial and rococo 
tricks with the banks. The fiction of the eighteenth century 
was, at its greatest, equal to the greatest ever seen ; but it was as 
yet advancing with uncertain steps, and had not nearly explored 
its own domain. The history of the eighteenth century had 
returned to the true sense of history, and was endeavouring to be 
accurate; but it only once attained — it is true that with Gibbon 



CONCLUSION 427 



it probably attained once for all — a perfect combination of dili- 
gence and range, of matter and of style. 

In all these respects the list might, if it were proper, be ex- 
tended to much greater length. The twenty years from 1 780 to 
1800 show us in the most fascinating manner the turn of the tide, 
not as yet coming in three feet abreast, rather creeping up by 
tortuous channels and chance depressions, but rising and forcing 
a way wherever it could. In the poets, major and minor, of the 
period, omitting, and even not wholly omitting, Burns and Blake 
— who are of no time intrinsically, but who, as it happens, belong 
accidentally to this time as exponents, the one of the refreshing 
influence of dialect and freedom from literary convention, the 
other of the refreshing influence of sympathy with old models and 
mystical dreaming — all the restlessness of the approaching crisis 
is seen. Nothing in literature is more interesting than to watch 
the effect of the half-unconscious aims and desires of Cowper and 
Crabbe, to see how they try to put the new wine in the old 
bottles, to compare them with Goldsmith and Thomson on the 
one hand, with Wordsworth and Coleridge on the other. Hayley 
perhaps alone, or almost alone, is rebel to the comparative 
method. Hayley is one of these hopeless creatures who abound 
at all periods, and whose native cast of nothingness takes a faint 
fashion from the time. But even in the verse of " Monk " Lewis 
we see the itch for new measures, the craving for lyric movement ; 
even in the day- flies of the Delia Crusca group the desire to be 
"something different." And then in Bowles, with his sonnets of 
places, in Sayers, with his rhymeless Pindarics, we come upon the 
actual guides to the right way, guides the oddest, the blindest, the 
most stumbling, but still — as not merely chronology but the posi- 
tive testimony and the still more positive practice of those who 
followed them show — real guides and no misleaders. 

Least studied, perhaps, because of its want of positive savour 
in comparison with their later achievements, but more interesting 
than all of these, is the early work of Southey, Coleridge, and 
Wordsworth themselves, and the work, not merely early but later, 



428 CONCLUSION 



of men like Rogers and Campbell. Here the spectacle already 
presented in Crabbe and Cowper is repeated ; but the process is 
in a further stage, and the fermentation is determining, according 
to the nature of the fermenting material. On Rogers it is nearly 
powerless ; in Campbell only in his lyrics does it succeed in 
breaking up and dissolving the old crust ; in Southey the effect 
is never quite complete ; in Coleridge and Wordsworth, but 
especially in Coleridge, the leaven changes all the latter lump. 
Thenceforward the process is reversed. Instead of instances of 
advance amid a mass of inertia or aimless wandering we have 
instances of reaction amid a mass of advance. The work of the 
revolutionary time is done ; the scholar, contrary to Goethe's dic- 
tum, has now not merely to exercise himself but to perfect. 

The phenomena of the time in fiction are of the same char- 
acter, but they lead as yet to no such distinct turn. The tale- 
telling of Beckford is like the singing of Burns, not uncoloured 
by the time, but still in the main purely individual ; the purpose 
of the novels of Holcroft, Godwin, and Bage is groping in the 
dark ; the Radcliffian romance and its exaggeration by Lewis 
exhibit the same uncertainty, the same application of the Rule of 
False. And there is for once a more philosophical and less 
cowardly explanation — that Scott, the Joshua in this instance, as 
Coleridge and Wordsworth were in the other, was occupied else- 
where before he sought the Palestine of the novel. For it must 
be remembered that prose fiction, though it had been cultivated 
in a scattered and tentative way for thousands of years, was up to 
this time the most inorganic of literary kinds. Poets, when they 
chose to give themselves up to poetry and to turn their backs on 
convention, were almost as well off then as now. They had but 
to open the great Greeks of the fifth and fourth centuries before 
Christ, the Latins such as Lucretius and Catullus, the great 
mediaeval, the great Renaissance examples of their own art, to see, 
as soon as they chose to see, where and how to go right. The 
adventurer in fiction was destitute of any such assistance. Only 
a few examples of much real excellence in his art were before 



CONCLUSION 429 



him ; many of those existing (including most of the mediaeval 
instances) were hardly before him at all ; and none of these, 
with the exception of the eighteenth century novel of manners 
and character (which, in the nature of the case, was at that 
special time the last thing he wanted to imitate), and the short 
tale of France and Italy, could be said to have been brought to 
anything like perfection. Hence the wanderings and the stum- 
blings here were far greater, the touch of the groping hands far 
feebler and less sure than even in poetry ; but the crying for the 
light was there too, and it was to be heard in time. Even as it 
was, before the century closed, Miss Edgeworth had given impor- 
tant new lines to fiction, and was on the eve of opening the most 
fertile of all its seams or veins, that of national or provincial 
character ; the purpose-novel just referred to was full of future, 
though it might be a future of a perilous and disputable kind ; the 
terror-romance, subdued to saner limits and informed with greater 
knowledge and greater genius, was not soon to cease out of the 
land ; and, a detail not to be neglected, the ever increasing popu- 
larity of the novel was making it more and more certain that it 
would number good intellects sooner or later. 

In all other directions, with the single exception of drama, in 
which there was neither performance nor promise, so far as 
literature was concerned, to any great extent, the same restless- 
ness of effort, and not always the same incompetence of result 
was seen. The fact of the revolutionary war abroad and the 
coercive policy thereby necessitated at home may have somewhat 
postponed the appearance of the new kind of periodical, in all 
shapes from quarterly to daily, which was to be so great a feature 
of the next age ; but the same causes increased the desire for it 
and prepared not a few of its constituents. It is impossible for 
any tolerably careful reader not to notice how much more 
" modern," to use an unphilosophical but indispensable term, is 
the political satire both in verse and prose, which has been noticed 
in the first chapter of this book, than the things of more or less 
the same kind that immediately preceded it. It was an accident, 



430 CONCLUSION 



no doubt, that made the Anti-Jacobin ridicule Darwin's caricature 
of eighteenth century style in poetry ; yet that ridicule did far 
more to put this particular convention out of fashion than all the 
attacks of the same paper on innovators like Coleridge (who at 
that time had hardly attempted their literary innovations) could 
do harm. The very interest in foreign affairs, brought about by 
the most universal war that had ever been known, helped to in- 
troduce the foreign element which was to play so large a part in 
literature ; and little affection as the critic may have for the prin- 
ciples of Godwin or of Paine, he cannot deny that the spirit of 
inquiry, the rally and shock of attack and defence, are things a 
great deal better for literature than a placid contentment with 
accepted conventions. 

Theology indeed may share with drama the reproach of having 
very little that is good to show from this time, or indeed for a long 
time to come. For the non-conformist sects and the Low Church 
party, which had resulted from the Evangelical movement in the 
earlier eighteenth century, were, the Unitarians excepted, for the 
most part illiterate. The Deist controversy had ceased, or, as 
conducted against Paine, required no literary skill ; and the High 
Church movement had not begun. Philosophy, not productive of 
very much, was more active ; and the intensely alien and novel 
styles of German thought were certain in time to produce their 
effect, while their working was in exact line with all the other 
tendencies we have been surveying. 

In short, during these twenty years, literature in almost all its 
parts was being thoroughly " boxed about." The hands that stirred 
it were not of the strongest as yet, they were absolutely unskilled, 
and for the most part they had not even any very clear conception 
of what they wanted to do. But almost everybody felt that some- 
thing had to be done, and was anxious — even childishly anxious 
— to do something. It by no means always happens that such 
anxiety is rewarded or is a good sign ; but it is always a note- 
worthy one, and in this instance there is no doubt about either 
the fact of the reward or its goodness. 



CONCLUSION 431 



The subsequent history of poetry during the century divides 
itself in an exceedingly interesting way, which has not perhaps yet 
been subjected to full critical comment. There are in it five 
pretty sharply marked periods of some ten or fifteen years each, 
which are distinguished, the first, third, and fifth, by the appear- 
ance in more or less numbers of poets of very high merit, and of 
characteristics more or less distinctly original ; the second and 
fourth by poetic growths, not indeed scanty in amount and some- 
times exquisite in quality, but tentative, fragmentary, and un- 
decided. It will of course be understood that in this, as in all 
literary classifications, mathematical accuracy must not be ex- 
pected, and that the lives of many of the poets mentioned neces- 
sarily extend long before and after the periods which their poetical 
production specially distinguishes. In fact the life of Wordsworth 
covers as nearly as possible the whole five sub-periods mentioned, 
reckoning from his own birth-year to that of almost the youngest 
of the poets, of whom we shall here take account. And perhaps 
there are few better ways of realising the extraordinary eminence 
of English nineteenth century poetry than by observing, that during 
these eighty years there was never a single one at which more 
or fewer persons were not in existence, who had produced or 
were to produce poetry of the first class. And the more the 
five-fold division indicated is examined and analysed the more 
curious and interesting will its phenomena appear. 

The divisions or batches of birth-years are worth indicating 
separately : the first comprises the eighth and ninth decades 
of the eighteenth century, from the birth of Scott and the Lakers 
to that of Shelley, with Keats as a belated and so to speak post- 
humous but most genuine child of it ; the second covers about 
fifteen years from the birth of George Darley, who was of the same 
year (1795) w ^ tn Keats, to the eve of that of Tennyson*; the third 
goes from 18 10 or thereabouts, throwing back to include the 
elder Tennysons and Mrs. Browning ; the fourth extends from 
about 1825 to 1836; the fifth from the birth of Mr. Morris 
(throwing back as before to admit Rossetti) to the end. 



432 CONCLUSION 



In the first of these we see the Romantic revolt or renaissance, 
whichever word may be preferred, growing up under the joint 
influences of the opening of mediaeval and foreign literature; of 
the excitement of the wars of the French Revolution; of the more 
hidden but perhaps more potent force of simple ebb-and-flow 
which governs the world in all things, though some fondly call it 
Progress ; and of the even more mysterious chance or choice, 
which from time to time brings into the world, generally in groups, 
persons suited to effect the necessary changes. The " Return to 
Nature," or to be less question-begging let us say the taking up of a 
new standpoint in regard to nature, made half unconsciously by men 
like Cowper and Crabbe, assisted without intending it by men like 
Burns and Blake, effected in intention if not in full achievement 
by feeble but lucky pioneers like Bowles, asserts itself once for all 
in the Lyrical Ballads, and then works itself out in different — in 
almost all possibly different — ways through the varying administra- 
tion of the same spirit by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley and 
Keats, in the highest and primary rank, by Scott and Byron in the 
next, by Southey, Campbell, Leigh Hunt, Moore, and others in the 
third. And it is again most interesting to watch how the exertion 
of influence and the character of it are by no means in proportion 
to the exact poetical strength of the agent. Scott and Byron, 
certainly inferior as poets to the first four mentioned, have prob- 
ably had a greater bulk of poetical influence and poetical action on 
mankind at large certainly, and a vastly earlier, more immediate and 
more sweeping influence on other poets than their betters, keigh 
Hunt, a poet quite of the third rank, exercised directly and 
indirectly, through Shelley and Keats, an influence on the form of 
poetry, on metre, cadence, phrase, greater than any of the others, 
save Wordsworth and Byron, and perhaps more than these. 
In all ways, however, by this channel and that, in straightforward 
or stealthy fashion, the poetic flood comes up, and by the death 
of Byron, Shelley and Keats having still more prematurely gone 
before, it is at its very highest spring. Six and twenty years 
passed, from 1798 to 1824, from the time when the Lyrical 



CONCLUSION 433 



Ballads were brought out to take their chance to the time when 
Mr. Beddoes, Mr. Procter, and somebody else clubbed to publish 
Shelley's posthumous poems at their own expense or at least 
guarantee, and justly objected to paying for more than 250 copies, 
because more were not likely to be sold. In these six and twenty 
years such an addition had been made to English poetry as five 
times the space had not previously seen, as perhaps was not far 
from equalling the glorious gains of a not very different though 
somewhat longer space of time between the appearance of the 
Shepherd's Calendar and the death of Shakespeare. 

But the sequel of this abnormally high tide is hardly less in- 
teresting than itself. We generally expect at such moments in 
literature either a decided falling off, or else a period of decent 
imitation, of " school work." It would be absurd to say that 
there is no contrast, no falling off, and no imitation in the group 
of poets noticed at the end of the second chapter in this volume. 
But they are not utterly decadent, and they are by no means 
purely or merely imitative. On the contrary, their note is quite 
different from that of mere school work, and in a sort of eccentric 
and spasmodic fashion they attain to singular excellence. Hood, 
Praed, Macaulay, Taylor, Darley, Beddoes, Hartley Coleridge, 
Home, are not to Wordsworth or Coleridge, to Byron or to Shelley, 
what the later so-called Elizabethan playwrights are to Jonson 
and Fletcher, the later poets of the same time to Spenser and 
Donne. But they almost all, perhaps all, seem forced to turn 
into some bye-way or backwater of poetry, to be unable or un- 
willing to keep the crown of the causeway, the flood of the tide. 
Hood and Praed — the former after actually attempting great 
poetry, and coming nearer to it than some great poets come in 
their first attempts — wander into the special borderland of humor- 
ous and grotesque verse, achieving in different parts of it some- 
thing not unlike absolute and unsurpassed success. Beddoes, 
and to some extent Darley, adopt fantastic varieties, grim in the 
former's hands, playful chiefly in the latter's, but alike remote 
from everyday interests and broad appeals ; while the incompar- 



434 CONCLUSION 



able lyrics of Beddoes are of no special time or school, their very 
Elizabethanism being somewhat delusive. Taylor and Home 
attempt the serious moral play with hardly any stage purposes or 
possibilities, and Home in Orion tries an eccentric kind of ethical 
or satirical epic. Macaulay — the most prominent of all, and the 
most popular in his tastes and aims — is perhaps the nearest to a 
"schoolman," adapting Scott as he does in his Lays; yet even 
here there is no mere imitation. 

Thus the people of this minor transition exhibit — in a most 
interesting way, rendered even more interesting by the repetition 
of it which, as we have seen and shall see, came about twenty 
years later — the mixed phenomena of an after-piece and a lever 
de rideau, of precursorship and what we must for want of a better 
word call decadence. They were not strong enough in them- 
selves, or were not favourably enough circumstanced, entirely to 
refresh or redirect the main current of poetry ; so they deviated 
from it. But hardly in the least of them is there absent the sign 
and symptom of the poetic spirit being still about, of the poetic 
craft still in full working order. And their occasional efforts, 
their experiments in the half-kinds they affected, have a curious 
charm. English poetry would be undeniably poorer without the 
unearthly snatches of Beddoes, the exquisitely urbane verse-of- 
society of Praed, the pathetic-grotesque of Hood, even the stately 
tirades of Home and Taylor. Some of them, if not all, may at 
this or that time have been exaggerated in value, by caprice, by 
reaction, by mere personal sympathy. But no universal critic 
will refuse admiration to them in and for themselves. 

In the next stage we are again face to face, not with half- 
talents, uncertain of their direction, but with whole genius, inevit- 
ably working on its predestined lines. Nothing quite like the 
poetical career and the poetical conception of Alfred Tennyson 
and of Robert Browning, so different in all respects, except that 
of duration and coincidence in time, meets us in English, perhaps 
nothing similar meets us in any literature. It is easy to overesti- 
mate both ; and both have been overestimated. It is still easier 



CONCLUSION 435 



to depreciate both ; and both have been depreciated. Both wrote 
constantly, and at frequent intervals, for some sixty years — the 
same sixty years — and, with not more than fair allowance for the 
effects of time, both wrote at the end better than at the beginning, 
and nearly as well as at the best time of each. Wordsworth, it is 
true, wrote for nearly as long, but no one can assert the same 
duration of equality in his production. 

In a certain sense, no doubt, neither can claim the same 
distinct individuality, the same unmistakable and elementary 
quality, as that which distinguishes Chaucer, Spenser, Shake- 
speare, Wordsworth, Shelley. The work of each is always at once 
recognisable by any tolerably competent judge ; but the signs of 
identity are more composite than atomic, more derived and 
literary than essentially native. Browning's unconventional man- 
nerisms, and his wide range of subject, have made him seem 
even less of a mere scholar than Tennyson ; but, as a fact, each is 
independent enough to a certain extent and to a certain extent 
only. In both appears, perhaps for the first time, certainly for 
the first time in combination with distinct original genius, that 
indebtedness to the past, that relapse upon it in the very act of 
forming vast schemes for the future, which is more the note of the 
nineteenth century than anything else. They not merely have all 
literature and all history behind them ; but they know it. Yet 
this knowledge does not weigh on them. They do not exactly 
neglect it as Wordsworth and Shelley were still able to do, but 
they keep it under. It is the attendant fiend for which they must 
find work, but which they never, as too many of their contempor- 
aries and followers have done, allow to become their master. 
And so they two, as it seems to me, do actually win their way to 
the first class, not perhaps to the absolutely first division of it, but 
to a first class still pretty rigidly limited. 

It is not the object of this Conclusion to deal with the perform- 
ances of individuals at any length, and therefore I must refer back 
to the text for a detailed indication of the position of Keats as the 
summer-up of the tradition of the first of the groups or periods here 



436 CONCLUSION chap. 

noticed, and the begetter, master, and teacher of the third, as 
well as for descriptions of the different manners in which Tenny- 
son and Browning respectively shared and distributed between 
themselves that catholic curiosity in poetical subject, that explora- 
tion of all history and art and literature, which is the main character- 
istic of strictly nineteenth century poetry. But it is very pertinent 
here to point out the remarkable way in which these two poets, 
from the unexampled combination of length and potency in their 
poetical period of influence, governed all the poetry that has 
followed them. We shall now see that under their shadow at 
least two well-marked groups arose, each of magnitude and 
individuality sufficient to justify the assignment to it of a separate 
position. Yet it was in their shadow that these rose and nourished, 
and though the trees themselves have at length fallen, the shadow 
of their names is almost as great as ever. 

The first of these two groups, the fourth of our present classifi- 
cation, renews, as has been said before, the features of its twenty 
or thirty years older forerunner, the group between Keats and 
Tennyson, in a most curious and attractive fashion. Once more 
we find the notes of uncertainty, of straying into paths, — not always 
quite blind-alleys, but bye-paths certainly, — the presence of isolated 
burst and flash, of effort unsuccessful or unequal as a whole. But 
here we find, what in the earlier chapter or section we do not 
find, distinct imitativeness and positive school-following. This 
imitation, attempting Shelley at times with little success (for, let 
it be repeated, Shelley is not imitable), selected in regular chrono- 
logical order, three masters, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Browning, 
though in each stage the master of the preceding rather shared 
than yielded his chair. It has been said in a famous passage 
that Wordsworth was more read about sixty years ago than at any 
time before or since, and this may perhaps be true. But his 
influence on writers has not depended on his popularity with 
readers, and from Sir Aubrey de Vere, who was born more than 
a century ago, to verse-writers who have only just published, his 
unmistakable tone, the tone which, so far as we can see, would 



CONCLUSION 437 



never have been if Wordsworth had never existed, shows itself. 
The writing influence of Tennyson did not begin till the issue of 
the Poems of 1842, but it began almost immediately then, and has 
remained in full force to the present day. It is an influence 
somewhat more external and technical than Wordsworth's, but for 
that reason even more unmistakable, and some of its results are 
among the most curious of school-copies in literature. As for 
Browning, imitation there tried both the outside and the inside, 
not very often with happy results, but, of course, with results even 
more obvious to the most uncritical eye than the results of the 
imitation of Tennyson itself. 

The attempts to be original and to break away from these and 
their imitations — the principal of them being that of the so-called 
Spasmodic school, which flourished at the dead waist and middle 
of the century — were not particularly happy, and those who in- 
cline to gloomy views may say that the imitation was less happy 
still. In Mr. Matthew Arnold, a recalcitrant but unmistakable 
Wordsworthian, sharing a partly reluctant allegiance between 
Wordsworth, the ancients, Goethe, and Tennyson himself, it is 
impossible not to think that a freer attitude, a more independent 
and less literary aim, might have strengthened his elegance, 
supplied his curious mixture of stiffness and grace, and even made 
him less unequal than he actually is. And yet he is much the 
greatest poet of the period. Its effect was more disastrous still 
upon the second Lord Lytton, who was content to employ an 
excellent lyrical vein, and a gift of verse satire of the fantastic 
kind so distinct and fascinating, that it approaches the merit of 
fantasists in other kinds of the former group, like Beddoes and 
Darley, to far too great an extent on echoes. The fact is, that 
by this time, to speak conceitedly, the obsession of the book was 
getting oppressive. Men could hardly sing for remembering, or, 
at least, without remembering, what others had sung before them, 
and became either slavishly imitative or wilfully recalcitrant to 
imitation. The great leaders indeed continued to sing each in 
his own way, and, though with perfect knowledge of their fore- 



438 CONCLUSION 



runners, not in the least hampered by that knowledge. But 
something else was needed to freshen the middle regions of song. 

It was found in that remarkable completion of the English 
Romantic movement, which is in relation to art called prse- 
Raphaelitism, and which is represented in literature, to mention 
only the greatest names, by Rossetti, his sister, Mr. Morris, and 
Mr. Swinburne. The death of the two former, and the fact that 
the movement itself, still active in art, has in a manner rounded 
itself off, though it is not necessarily finished, in literature, enable 
us to discuss it here as a whole, though its two chief poets are 
luckily still alive. 

The first thing of interest in general history which strikes 
us, in regard to this delightful chapter of English poetry, is its 
illustration — a common one in life and letters — of the fact that 
there is a false as well as a true side to the question quoted by 
Aristotle : " If water chokes you, what are you to drink on the 
top of it ? " " Wine," one kind of humourist might answer ; " More 
water," another : and both rightly. It has been said that the 
group which preceded this suffered from the pressure of too 
constant, wide, and various reminiscence, literary, artistic, and 
other. The prae-Raphaelites refreshed themselves and the world 
by applying still more strenuously to the particular kind and 
period of such reminiscence which had been hitherto, despite the 
mediaeval excursions of many from Percy to Tennyson, imperfectly 
utilised. The literary practitioners of the school (with whom 
alone we are concerned) were not indeed by any means purely 
mediaeval in their choice of subject, in their founts of inspiration, 
or in their method of treatment. English poetry has known few 
if any more accomplished scholars both in the classics and in the 
modern languages than Mr. Swinburne, for instance ; and some- 
thing similar might be said of others. But, on the whole, the 
return of this school — for all new things in literature are returns — 
was to a medievalism different from the tentative and scrappy 
medievalism of Percy, from the genial but slightly superficial 
medievalism of Scott, and even from the more exact but narrow 



CONCLUSION 439 



and distinctly conventionalised medievalism of Tennyson. They 
had other appeals, but this was their chief. 

It may seem that mere or main archaism is not a very 
charming or powerful thing, and in weaker hands it would not 
have been either one or the other ; but it so happened that these 
hands were very strong indeed. Mr. Rossetti had one of the 
most astonishing combinations ever known of artistically separate 
gifts, as well as a singular blend of passion and humour. His 
sister was one of the great religious poets of the world. Mr. 
Swinburne has never been surpassed, if he has ever been equalled, 
by any poet in any language for command of the more rushing 
and flowing forms of verse. Mr. Morris has few equals in any 
time or country for narrative at once decorative and musical. 
Moreover, though it may seem whimsical or extravagant to say so, 
these poets added to the very charm of mediaeval literature which 
they thus revived a subtle something which differentiates it from 
— which to our perhaps blind sight seems to be wanting in — 
mediaeval literature itself. It is constantly complained (and some 
of those who cannot go all the way with the complainants can see 
what they mean) that the graceful and labyrinthine stories, the 
sweet snatches of song, the quaint drama and legend of the 
Middle Ages lack — to us — life ; that they are shadowy, unreal, 
tapestry on the wall, not alive even as living pageants are. By 
the strong touch of modernness which these poets and the best of 
their followers introduced into their work, they have given the 
vivification required. 

Beyond them we must not go, nor inquire whether the poets 
who have not come to forty years represent a new school of the 
masterful and supreme kind, or one of the experimental and 
striving sort, or something a good deal worse than this, a period 
of sheer interval and suspense, unenlivened even by considerable 
attempt. Not only our scheme, not only common prudence and 
politeness, but most of all the conditions of critical necessity insist 
on the curtain being here dropped. It is possible that a critic 
may be able to isolate and project himself sufficiently to judge, as 



44° CONCLUSION 



posterity will judge them, the actually accomplished work of his 
own contemporaries and juniors. But even such a skilful and 
fortunate person cannot judge the work which they have not yet 
produced, and which may in all cases, and must in some, modify 
their position and alter their rank. 

But what has been has been, and on this mass (not in the 
actual case " vulgar " by any means) of things done it is possible 
to pronounce securely. And with security it may be said that 
for total amount, total merit, total claims of freshness and 
distinctness, no period of poetical literature can much, if at all, 
exceed the ninety years of English verse from The Ancient 
Marine?' to Crossing the Bar. The world has had few poets 
better than the best of ours during this time in degree ; it has 
had none like Shelley, perhaps none exactly like Wordsworth, in 
kind. The secret of long narrative poems that should interest 
has been recovered ; the sonnet, one of the smallest but one of 
the most perfect of poetic forms, has been recovered likewise. 
Attempts to recover the poetic drama have been mostly failures ; 
and serious satire has hardly reappeared. But lighter satire, 
with other " applied " poetry, has shown variety and excel- 
lence. Above all lyric, the most poetic kind of poetry, has 
attained a perfection never known before, except once in Eng- 
land and once in Greece. It has been impossible hitherto to 
make a full and free anthology of the lyric poets from Burns 
and Blake to Tennyson and Browning to match the anthologies 
often made of those from Surrey or Sidney to Herrick or 
Vaughan. But when it can be done it is a question whether 
the later volume will not even excel the earlier in intensity and 
variety, if not perhaps in freshness of charm. 

And then it is needful once more to insist, even at the risk of 
disgusting, on the additional interest given by the subtle and 
delicate, but still distinctly traceable gradations, the swell and 
sinking, the flow and ebb, of poetical production and character 
during the time. As no other flourishing time of any poetry 
has lasted so long, so none has had the chance of developing 



CONCLUSION 441 



these mutations in so extensive and attractive a manner ; in none 
has it been possible to feel the pulse of poetry, so to speak, in so 
connected and considerable a succession of experiment. Poetical 
criticism can never be scientific ; but it can seldom have had an 
opportunity of going nearer to a scientific process than here, 
owing to the volume, the connection, the duration, the accessi- 
bility of the phenomena submitted to the critic. The actual 
secret as usual escapes ; but we can hunt the fugitive by a closer 
trail than usual through the chambers of her flight. 

Of the highest poetry, however, as of other highest things, 
Goethe's famous axiom Uber alien Gipfeln ist Rich holds good. 
Although there is a difference between the expressions of this 
highest poetry in the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ, in the 
fourteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth after Christ there is also a 
certain quiet sameness, not indiscernibility but still identity. The 
lower kinds of literature admit of more apparent and striking 
freshness of exterior. And perhaps the most strikingly fresh, 
some might even say the distinctive, product of the nineteenth 
century, is its prose fiction. 

This, as has been shown in detail, is much later in date than 
the poetry in anything like a characteristic and fully developed 
state. Although it was busily produced during the last twenty 
years of the eighteenth century and the first fifteen of the 
nineteenth, the very best work of the time, except such purely 
isolated things as Vathek, are experiments, and all but the very 
best — the novels of Miss Edgeworth, those written but not till 
quite the end of the time published by Miss Austen, and a very 
few others — are experiments of singular lameness and ill success. 

With Scott's change from verse to prose, the modern romance 
admittedly, and to a greater extent than is generally thought the 
modern novel, came into being ; and neither has gone out of 
being since. In the two chapters which have been devoted to the 
subject we have seen how the overpowering success of Waverley 
bred a whole generation of historical novels ; how side by side 
with this the older novel of manners, slightly altered, continued 



442 CONCLUSION 



to be issued, with comic deviations chiefly, as in the hands of 
Theodore Hook ; how Bulwer attempted a sort of cross between 
the two ; how about the middle of the century the historical novel 
either ceased or changed, to revive later after a middle period 
illustrated by the brilliant romances of Kingsley ; how about the 
same time the strictly modern novel of manners came into being 
in the hands of Thackeray, Miss Bronte, George Eliot, and 
Anthony Trollope, Dickens overlapping both periods in a fantastic 
and nondescript style of his own ; and how more recently still 
both romance and novel have spread out and ramified into 
endless subdivisions. 

There is, however, this broad line of demarcation between 
poetry and the novel, that they are written for different ends and 
from different motives. It is natural to man to write poetry ; it 
does not appear to be by any means so certainly or unvaryingly 
necessary to him to read it. Except at rare periods and for short 
times, poetry has never offered the slightest chance of livelihood 
to any considerable number of persons ; and it is tolerably 
certain that if the aggregate number of poets since the foundation 
of the world had had nothing to live on but their aggregate gains 
as poets, starvation would have been the commonplace rule, 
instead of the dramatic exception, among the sons of Apollo. 

On the other hand, it is no doubt also natural to man to tell 
prose stories, and it seems, though it was a late-discovered 
aptitude, that it is not unnatural to him to read them; but the 
writing of them does not seem to be at all an innate or widely 
disseminated need. Until some hundred or two hundred years 
ago very few were written at all ; the instances of persons who do 
but write novels because they must are exceedingly rare, and it is 
as certain as anything can be that of the enormous production of 
the last three-quarters of a century not 5, perhaps not 1 per 
cent would have been produced if the producing had not led, 
during the whole of that time, in most cases but those of hopeless 
incompetence to some sort of a livelihood, in many to very 
comfortable income, and in some to positive wealth and fame. 



CONCLUSION 443 



In other words, poetry is the creation of supply and novel-writ- 
ing of demand ; poetry can hardly ever be a trade and in very 
rare cases a profession, while novel-writing is commonly a very 
respectable profession, and unfortunately sometimes a rather dis- 
reputable trade. 

Like other professions, however, it enlists genius sometimes, 
talent often ; and the several and successive ways in which this 
genius and this talent show themselves are of more than sufficient 
interest. But the steady demand, and the inevitable answer to it, 
work adversely to such spontaneous and interesting fluctuations 
of production as those which we have traced in reference to 
poetry. There have been times, particularly that between the 
cessation of Sir Walter's best work and the perfecting of that of 
Thackeray, in which the average value of even the best novels 
was much lower than at other times. But even in these the 
average volume maintained itself very well, and, indeed, steadily 
increased. 

It is this which, with another to be mentioned shortly, will, 
so far as it is possible for a contemporary to judge, be noted in 
the literary history of the future as the distinguishing crop or 
field of the nineteenth century. Sermons, essays, plays, no 
doubt, continue to be written ; but the novel has supplanted the 
sermon, the essay, the play in the place which each at different 
times held as the popular form of literature. It may be added, 
or repeated, that it has in part at least achieved this result by 
trespassing upon the provinces of all these three forms and of 
many others. This is true, but is of somewhat less importance 
than might be thought. The fable has an old trick of adjusting 
itself to almost every possible kind of literary use, and the novel 
is only an enlarged and more fully organised fable. It does not, 
no doubt, do best when it abuses this privilege of its ancestor, and 
saturates itself overmuch with " purpose," but it has at least an 
ancestral right to do so. 

There is no doubt also that the popularity of the novel has been 
very directly connected with a cause which has had all manner of 



444 CONCLUSION 



effects fathered upon it — often with no just causation or filiation 
whatever — to wit, the spread of education. In the proper sense 
of course the spread of education must always be strictly limited. 
The number of educable persons probably bears a pretty con- 
stant ratio to the population, and when the education reaches 
the level of the individual's containing power, it simply runs 
over and is lost. But it is possible to teach nearly everybody 
reading and writing ; and it is a curious but exact observation that 
a very large proportion of those who have been taught reading 
require something to read. Now the older departments of 
literature do not lend themselves with any facility to constant 
reading by the average man or woman, whose requirements may 
be said to be amusement rather than positive delight, occupation 
much rather than intellectual exertion, and above all, something to 
pass time. For these requirements, or this compound requirement, 
the hearing of some new thing has been of old recognised as the 
surest and most generally useful specific. And the novel holds 
itself out, not indeed always quite truly, as being new or nothing 
by name and nature. Accordingly the demand for novels has 
gone on ever increasing, and the supply has never failed to keep 
up with it. 

Nor would it be just to say that the quality has sunk appreci- 
ably. The absolutely palmy day of the English nineteenth 
century in novel-writing was no doubt some thirty-five or forty 
years ago. Not even the contemporary France of that date can 
show such a " galaxy-gallery " as the British novelists — Dickens, 
Thackeray, Miss Bronte, George Eliot, Trollope, Kingsley, Bulvver, 
Disraeli, Lever, Mr. Meredith, and others — who all wrote in the 
fifties. But at the beginning of the period the towering genius of 
Scott and the perfect art of Miss Austen, if we add to them 
Miss Edgeworth's genial talent, did not find very much of even 
good second-rate matter to back them ; there was, as has been 
said, a positively barren time succeeding this first stage and 
preceding the " fifty " period ; and twenty years or a little more 
ago, when Thackeray and Dickens were dead, Trollope and George 



CONCLUSION 445 



Eliot past their best, Kingsley and Bulwer moribund, Mr. Mere- 
dith writing sparely and unnoticed, the new romantic school not 
arisen, and no recruit of distinction except Mr. Blackmore firmly 
set, things were apparently a great deal worse with us in point of 
novel-writing than they are at present. Whether, with a return of 
promise and an increase of performance, with a variation of styles 
and an abundance of experiment, there has also been a relapse 
into the extravagances which we have had in this very book to 
chronicle as characterising the fiction of exactly a century ago, — 
whether we have had over-luxuriant and non-natural style, attempts 
to attract by loose morality, novels of purpose, novels of problem, 
and so forth, — and whether the coming age will dismiss much of 
our most modern work as not superior in literary and inferior in 
other appeal to the work of Godwin and Lewis, Holcroft and 
Bage, it is not necessary distinctly to say. But our best is cer- 
tainly better than the best of that time, our worst is perhaps not 
worse ; and the novel occupies a far higher place in general esti- 
mation than it did then. Indeed it has been observed by the 
sarcastic that to some readers of novels, and even to some writers 
of them, " novel " and " book" seem to be synonymous terms, and 
that when such persons speak of " literature," they mean and 
pretty distinctly indicate that they mean novel-writing, and novel- 
writing only. This at least shows that the seed which Scott sowed, 
or the plant which he grafted, has not lost its vitality. 

Certainly not less, perhaps even more, distinctive of the time 
in history must be that development and transformation of what 
is broadly called the newspaper, of which the facts and details 
have occupied two more of these chapters. It is true that at times 
considerably earlier than even the earliest that here concerns us, 
periodical writing had been something of a power in England as 
regards politics, had enlisted eminent hands, and had even served 
once or twice as the means of introduction of considerable works 
in belles lettrcs. But the Addisonian Essay had been something 
of an accident ; Swift's participation in the Examiner was another ; 
Defoe's abundant journalism brought him more discredit than 



446 CONCLUSION 



profit or praise ; and though Pulteney and the Opposition worked 
the press against Walpole, the process brought little benefit to the 
persons concerned. Reviewing was meagrely done and wretch- 
edly paid ; the examples of Robinson Crusoe earlier and Sir 
Launcelot Greaves later are exceptions which prove the rule that 
the feuilleton was not in demand ; in fact before our present 
period newspaper-writing was rather dangerous, was more than 
rather disreputable, and offered exceedingly little encouragement 
to any one to make it the occasion of work in pure literature, or 
even to employ it as a means of livelihood, while attempting other 
and higher, though less paying kinds. 

The period of the French Revolution, if not the French Revo- 
lution itself, changed all this, assisted no doubt by the natural 
and inevitable effects of the spread of reading and the multiplica- 
tion of books. People wanted to see the news ; papers sprang 
up in competition to enable them to see the news ; and the com- 
petitors strove to make themselves more agreeable than their 
rivals by adding new attractions. Again, the activity of the 
Jacobin party, which early and of course directed itself to the 
press, necessitated activity on the other side. The keenest intel- 
lects, the best-trained wits of the nation, sometimes under some 
disguise, sometimes openly, took to journalism, and it became 
simply absurd to regard the journalist as a disreputable garreteer 
when Windham and Canning were journalists. The larger sale of 
books and the formation of a regular system of " pushing " them 
also developed reviews — too frequently, no doubt, in the direction 
of mere puffing, but even thus with the beneficent result that other 
reviews came into existence which were not mere puff-engines. 

Even these causes and others will not entirely explain the 
extraordinary development of periodicals of all kinds from 
quarterly to daily, of which the Edinburgh, Blackivood, the 
Examiner, and the Times were respectively the most remarkable 
examples and pioneers in the earlier years of the century, though 
as a literary organ the Morning Post had at first rather the 
advantage of the Times. But, as has been said here constantly, 



CONCLUSION 447 



you can never explain everything in literary history ; and it would 
be extremely dull if you could. The newspaper press had, for 
good or for ill, to come ; external events to some obvious extent 
helped its coming ; individual talents and aptitudes helped it 
likewise ; but the main determining force was the force of hidden 
destiny. 

There is, however, no mistake possible about the results. It 
is but a slight exaggeration to say that the periodical rapidly 
swallowed up all other forms of literature, to this extent and in 
this sense, that there is hardly a single one of these forms 
capital performance in which has not at one time or another 
formed part of the stuff of periodicals, and has not by them been 
first introduced to the world. Not a little of our poetry ; probably 
the major part of our best fiction ; all but a very small part of our 
essay-writing, critical, meditative, and miscellaneous ; and a por- 
tion, much larger than would at one time have seemed conceivable, 
of serious writing in history, philosophy, theology, science, and 
scholarship, have passed through the mint or mill of the news- 
paper press before presenting themselves in book form. A certain 
appreciable, though small part of the best, with much of the worst, 
has never got beyond that form. 

To attempt to collect the result of this change is to attempt some- 
thing not at all easy, something perhaps which may be regarded 
as not particularly valuable. The distinction between literature 
and journalism which is so often heard is, like most such things, 
a fallacy, or at least capable of being made -fallacious. Put as it 
usually is when the intention is disobliging to the journalist, it 
comes to this : — that the Essays of Elia, that Southey's Life of 
Nelson, that some of the best work of Carlyle, Tennyson, Thack- 
eray, and others the list of whom might be prolonged at pleasure, 
is not literature. Put as it sometimes is by extremely foolish 
people, it would go to the extent that anything which has not been 
published in a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly publication is 
literature. 

There is probably no subject on which it is more necessary to 



448 CONCLUSION 



clear the mind of cant than this. Of course there is journalism 
in the sense opposed to literature, though not necessarily opposed 
in any bad sense. No wise man intends, and no wise man will 
ever suffer, articles which are in the strict sense articles, which are 
intended to comment on merely passing events, and to produce a 
merely immediate effect, to be extracted from journals and put on 
record as books. Not only is the treatment unsuitable for such 
record, but it may almost be said that the treatment suitable for 
things so to be recorded is actually unsuitable for things ephemeral. 
But there is a very large amount of writing to which this does not 
in the least apply, and in which it can make no kind of real 
difference whether the result appears by itself in a bound cloth 
volume as a whole, or in parts with other things in a pamphlet, 
covered with paper, or not covered at all. The grain of truth 
which the fallacy carries is really this : — that the habit of treating 
some subjects in the peculiar fashion most effective in journalism 
may spread disastrously to the treatment of other subjects which 
ought to be treated as literature. This is a truth, but not a large 
one. There have been at all times, at least since the invention 
of printing and probably before it, persons who, though they may 
be guiltless of having ever written an article in their lives, have 
turned out more or less ponderous library volumes in which the 
very worst sins of the worst kind of journalist are rampant. 

There are, 'however, more thoughtful reasons for regarding the 
development of periodicals as not an unmixed boon to letters. 
The more evanescent kinds of writing are, putting fiction out of 
the question, so much the more profitable in journalism that it 
certainly may tempt — that it certainly has tempted — men who 
could produce, and would otherwise have produced, solid literature. 
And there is so much more room in it for light things than 
for things which the average reader regards as heavy, that the 
heavy contributor is apt to be at a discount, and the light at a 
premium. But all this is exceedingly obvious. And it may be met 
on the other side by the equally obvious consideration already 
referred to, that periodicals have made the literary life possible 



CONCLUSION 



449 



in a vast number of cases where it was not possible before ; that 
whereas " toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol " was not a 
very exaggerated description of its prospects little more than a 
hundred years ago, the patron has become superfluous, want 
and the gaol rather unlikely, except in cases of extreme mis- 
conduct, incompetence, or ill-luck, while if toil and envy remain 
unvanquished, they are not specially fated to the literary lot. 
Indeed the more paradoxical of Devil's Advocates against the 
press usually urge that it has made the literary life too easy, 
has tempted too many into it, and has thereby increased the flood 
of mediocrity. 

The most serious objection of all perhaps, though even this 
is rather idle in face of accomplished facts, is that the perpetual 
mincing up and boiling down of the constituents of the diet of 
reading have produced, in the appetite and digestive faculties of 
the modern reader, an inability to cope with a really solid meal 
of perhaps slightly tough matter, and that periodicals not merely 
eschew the provision of this solid stuff themselves, but do their 
best to make things worse by manipulating the contents of books 
that do contain it. 

The fact, however, once more, concerns us much more than 
moralisings about the fact ; and the fact of the prominence, the 
extraordinary prominence, of the periodical press in the nine- 
teenth century, is as little open to dispute as the prominence in 
that century's later mechanical history of discoveries in electricity, 
or in its earlier of experiments with steam. Occasionally one 
may hear enthusiasts of one kind or another announcing with joy 
or horror that the periodical is killing the book. But if it is, it is 
very impartially engaged in begetting it at the same time that it . 
kills ; and it may be very seriously doubted whether this killing of 
a book is an easy act of murder to commit. With the printing 
press to produce, the curiosity of man to demand, and his vanity 
and greed — if not also his genius and ambition — to supply, the 
book is in all probability pretty safe. In the forms and varieties 
of this periodical publication we have seen some interesting changes. 



450 CONCLUSION 



As might have been expected, the tendency has been for the inter- 
vals of publication to be shortened — for the quarterly to give way 
as the fashionable form to the monthly, the monthly to the 
weekly, the weekly to the daily. Many years ago Macaulay, in a 
mild protest against having his articles altered by Macvey Napier, 
suggested in effect that the bloom might be left on poor things 
destined to be read only for a month or so. The duration of 
an article now may be measured rather by hours than by weeks. 
Still many of these changes are more apparent than real; and just 
as the institution of the graver monthly reviews twenty years ago 
simply reintroduced the quarterly article in a scarcely altered form 
after it had been pushed out of favour by the slighter magazine, 
so other introductions have been in fact reintroductions. 

One point, however, of real importance in literary history 
remains to be noticed, and that is the conflict between signed 
and anonymous writing. Partly from the causes above enume- 
rated as having conduced to the keeping of journalism in a 
condition of discredit and danger, partly owing to national 
idiosyncrasies, the habit of anonymous writing was almost 
universal in the English press at the beginning of the century. 
It may have been perfectly well known that such and such an 
article in the Quarterly was by Southey or Croker, such another 
in the Edinburgh by Sydney Smith or Macaulay, but the know- 
ledge was, so to speak, unofficial. The question of the identity 
of " Zeta " in Blackwood cost a man's life ; and the system 
resulted (in daily papers especially) in so much editorial inter- 
mixture and refashioning, that sometimes it would really have 
been impossible to assign a single and authentic paternity. Even 
about the editorship of the great periodicals a sort of coquetry of 
veiling was preserved, and editors' names, though in most cases 
perfectly well known, seldom or never appeared. 

It is difficult to say exactly when or how this system began to 
be infringed. But there is no doubt that the prominence given 
in Household Words to the name and personality of Dickens, 
who was not unfriendly to self-advertisement, had a good deal to 



CONCLUSION 451 



do with it ; and when, a little later, the cheap shilling magazines 
appeared, writing with names became the rule, without them 
the exception. Criticism, however, for obvious reasons still held 
back ; and it was not till about five and twenty years ago that the 
example, taken more or less directly from the French, of signed 
reviews was set by the Academy among weekly papers, and the 
Fortnightly among monthly reviews. It has been very largely 
followed even in daily newspapers, and the Saturday Review was 
probably the last newspaper of mark that maintained an absolutely 
rigid system of anonymity. It should, however, be observed that 
the change, while not even yet complete — leading articles being 
still very rarely signed — has by no means united all suffrages, and 
has even lost some that it had. Mr. John Morley, for instance, 
who had espoused it warmly as editor of the Fortnightly, and had, 
perhaps, done more than any other man to spread it, has avowed 
in a very interesting paper grave doubts about the result. Still it 
undoubtedly has increased, and is increasing, and in such cases it 
is much easier to express an opinion that things ought to be dimin- 
ished, than either to expect that they will, or to devise any means 
whereby the diminution is to be effected. As for what is desir- 
able as distinguished from what is likely, the weight of opinion 
may be thought to be in favour of the absence of signature. 
Anonymous criticism, if abused, may no doubt be abused to a 
graver extent than is possible with signed criticism. But such a 
hackneyed maxim as corruptio optimi shows that this is of itself 
no argument. On the other hand, signed criticism diminishes 
both the responsibility and the authority of the editor ; it adds 
either an unhealthy gag or an unhealthy stimulus to the tongue 
and pen of the contributor ; it lessens the general weight of the 
verdict ; and it provokes the worst fault of criticism, the aim at 
showing off the critic's cleverness rather than at exhibiting the 
real value and character of the thing criticised. And perhaps 
some may think the most serious objection of all to be that it 
encourages the employment of critics, and the reception of what 
they say, rather for their names than for their competence. 



452 CONCLUSION 



In that very important department of literature which stands 
midway between Belles Lettres and Science, the department of 
History, the century cannot indeed claim such striking and popu- 
larly effective innovations as in the departments of prose fiction 
and of periodical writing. Yet it may be questioned whether the 
change of this old kind is not in itself almost as noteworthy as in 
the other cases is the practical introduction of a new. What the 
change is was epigrammatically, if somewhat paradoxically, summed 
up recently by a great authority, Lord Acton. " History," the 
Cambridge Professor of that art or science said in his inaugural 
lecture, "has become independent of the historian." 

It is possible to demur to the fact, but it is not difficult to ex- 
plain the meaning. From the necessity of the case, the earliest 
history, at least in the West, is almost independent of documents and 
records. Thucydides and Herodotus wrote, the one from what he 
had actually seen and heard of contemporary events, the other 
partly from the same sources and partly from tradition of short date. 
Somewhat later historians of course had their predecessors before 
them, and in a few cases a certain amount of document, but never 
a large amount. When history, vernacular or Latin, began to be 
written again in the dark and middle ages, the absence of docu- 
ments was complicated (except in the case of those early chroniclers, 
English and Irish chiefly, who merely put down local events) by 
that more peculiar and unaccountable, though possibly kindred, 
absence of critical spirit, which, of the many things more or less 
fancifully attributed to the mediaeval mind, is perhaps the most 
certain. It is a constant puzzle to modern readers how to account 
exactly for the fashion in which men, evidently of great intel- 
lectual ability, managed to be without any sense of the value of 
evidence, or any faculty of distinguishing palpable and undoubted 
fiction from what either was, or reasonably might be held to be, 
history. But by degrees this sense came into being side by side 
with the multiplication of the document itself. Even then, however, 
it was very long before the average historian either could or would 
regard himself as bound first to consult all the documents available, 



CONCLUSION 45- 



and then to sift and adjust them in accordance rather with the laws 
of evidence and the teachings of the philosophy of history than 
with his own predilections, or with the necessities of an agree- 
able narrative. But the patient industry of the French school of 
historical scholars, at the end of the seventeenth and the begin- 
ning of the eighteenth century, founded this new tradition ; the 
magnificent genius of Gibbon showed how the observance of it 
might not be incompatible with history-writing of the most literary 
kind ; the national and natural tendency of German study adopted 
it ; and shortly after Gibbon's own day the school of historians, 
which is nothing if not documentary, began gradually to oust that 
of which the picturesque, if not strictly historical, legend about 
the Abbe Vertot and his " Mon siege est fait " is the anecdotic 
locus classicus of characterisation. 

It has been shown, in the chapter devoted to the subject, how 
this school of documentary historians grew and flourished in 
England itself, from the days of Turner and Palgrave to those of 
Froude and Freeman. Certainly there could not, at least for some 
time, be said to be any very sensible tendency in history to dis- 
pense with the historian, or, in other and perhaps rather more in- 
telligible words, of history ceasing to be literary. No historians 
have been more omnilegent, more careful of the document, than 
Carlyle and Macaulay, much as they differed in other respects, and 
in no histories has the "historian" — that is to say, the personal 
writer as opposed to the mere" diplomatist" — been more evident 
than he is in theirs. Nor is it very easy to see why the mere 
study of the document, still less why the mere accumulation of the 
document, should ever render superfluous the intelligent shaping 
which the historian alone can give. In the first place, documents 
are contradictory and want shifting and harmonising ; in the second 
they want grasping and interpreting ; in the third (and most im- 
portant of all) they need to be made alive. 

Nevertheless Lord Acton's somewhat enigmatic utterance points, 
however vaguely, to real dangers, and it would be idle to say 
that these dangers have not been exemplified in the period and 



454 CONCLUSION 



department we are considering. In the first place, the ever- 
increasing burden of the documents to be consulted is more and 
more crushing, and more and more likely to induce any one but 
a mere drudge either to relinquish the task in despair, or to per- 
form it with a constant fear before his eyes, which prevents freedom 
and breadth of work. In the second it leads, on the one hand, to 
enormous extension of the scale of histories, on the other to an 
undue restraining and limiting of their subjects. Macaulay took 
four large volumes to do, nominally at least, not more than a dozen 
years ; Froude twelve to cover fifty or sixty ; Grote as many to 
deal with the important, but neither long nor richly documented, 
period of Greek, or rather Athenian, flourishing. To this has to 
be added the very serious drawback that when examination of 
documents is ranked before everything, even the slightest question- 
ing of that examination becomes fatal, and a historian is discredited 
because some one of his critics has found a document unknown 
to him, or a flaw, possibly of the slightest importance, in his inter- 
pretation of the texts. 

Nevertheless it is necessary to lay our account with this new 
style of history, and it is fortunately possible to admit that the 
gains of it have not been small. Thanks to its practitioners, we 
know infinitely more than our fathers did, though it may not be 
so certain that we make as good a use of our knowledge. And 
the evil of multiplication of particulars, like other evils, brings its 
own cure. The work of mere rough-hewing, of examination into 
the brute facts, is being done — has to no small extent actually been 
done — as it never was done before. The " inedited" has ceased 
to be inedited — is put on record for anybody to examine with 
little trouble. The mere loss of valuable material, which has gone 
on in former ages to an extent only partially compensated by the 
welcome destruction of material that has no value at all, has been 
stopped. The pioneers of the historical summer (to borrow a 
decorative phrase from Charles of Orleans) have been very widely 
abroad, and there is no particular reason why the summer itself 
should not come. 



CONCLUSION 455 



When it does it will perhaps discard some ways and fashions 
which have been lately in vogue ; but it will assuredly profit by 
much that has been done during the period we survey, no less in 
form than in matter. The methods have been to a certain extent 
improved, the examples have been multiplied, the historical sense 
has certainly taken a wider and deeper hold of mankind. Very 
little is wanting but some one ausus contemnere va?ia ; and when 
the future Thucydides or the future Carlyle sets to work, he will 
be freed, by the labour of others, alike from the paucity of materials 
that a little weakened Thucydides, and from the brute mass of 
them that embittered the life of Carlyle. 

Not so much is to be said of the remaining divisions or depart- 
ments individually. If the drama of the century is not, in so far 
as acting drama is concerned, almost a blank from the point of 
view of literature, the literary drama of the century is almost a 
blank as regards acting qualities. It is true that there have been 
at times attempts to obtain restitution of conjugal rights on one 
side or on the other. In the second and third decades, perhaps a 
little later, a strong effort was made to give vogue to, and some 
vogue was obtained for, the scholarly if pale attempts of Milman 
and Talfourd, and the respectable work of others. Bulwer, his 
natural genius assisted by the stage- craft of Macready, brought 
the acting and the literary play perhaps nearer together than any 
one else did. Much later still, the mighty authority of Tennyson, 
taking to dramatic writing at the time when he was the unquestioned 
head of English poetry and English literature, and assisted by the 
active efforts of the most popular actor and manager of the day, 
succeeded in holding the stage fairly well with plays which are 
not very dramatic among dramas, and which are certainly not 
very poetical among their author's poems. With more recent times 
we have luckily nothing to do, and the assertions of some authors 
that they themselves or others have brought back literature to 
the stage may be left confronted with the assertions of not a few 
actors that, for reasons which they do not themselves profess 
entirely to comprehend, a modern drama is almost bound not to 



45 6 CONCLUSION 



be literary if it is to act, and not to act if it is literary. Some 
have boldly solved the difficulty by hinting, if not declaring, that 
the drama is an outworn form except as mere spectacle or enter- 
tainment ; others have exhausted themselves in solutions of a less 
trenchant kind ; none, it may safely be said, has really solved 
it. And though it is quite true that what has happened was pre- 
dicted sixty or seventy years ago, as a result of the breach of 
the monopoly of Covent Garden and Drury Lane, it is fair to say 
that the condition of the drama of at least a quarter of a century 
earlier had been little if at all better than it has been since. It 
is a simple fact that since Sheridan we have had no dramatist who 
combined very high acting with very high literary merit. 

Of what have been called the applied departments of literature, 
a somewhat less melancholy account has to be given ; but, except 
in their enormous multiplication of quantity, they present few 
opportunities for remarks of a general character. 

Very great names have been added to the list of theological 
writers, but these names on the whole belong to the earlier rather 
than to the later portion of the period, and even then something 
of a change has been observable in the kinds of their writing. 
The sermon, that is to say the literary sermon, has become more 
and more uncommon ; and the popular ear which calls upon itself 
to hear sermons at all prefers usually what are styled practical 
discourses, often deviating very considerably from the sermon 
norm, or else extremely florid addresses modelled on later Con- 
tinental patterns, and having as a rule few good literary qualities. 
So, too, the elaborate theological treatise has gone out of fashion, 
and it may be doubted whether, at least for the last half century, 
a single book of the kind has been added to the first class of 
Anglican theological writing. This writing has thus taken the 
form either of discourses of the older kind, maintained in existence 
by endowment or by old prescription, such as the Bampton 
Lectures, or of rather popular polemics, or of what may be called 
without disrespect theological journalism of various kinds. The 
general historical energy of the century, moreover, has not dis- 



CONCLUSION 457 



played itself least in the theological department, and valuable 
additions have been made, not merely to general church history, 
but to a vast body of biography and journal-history, as well as to 
a certain amount of Biblical scholarship. In this latter direction 
English scholars have distinguished themselves by somewhat less 
violation of the rules of criticism in general than their foreign 
brethren and masters. But it cannot be said that the nineteenth 
century is ever likely to rank high in the history of English 
theology. Even its greatest names — Irving, Chalmers, the Oxford 
leaders, and others, with perhaps the single exception of Newman 
— are important much more personally and as influences than as 
literary figures ; while the rank and file, putting history aside, have 
been distinctly less noteworthy than in any of the three preceding 
centuries. 

The " handmaid of theology " has received, at any rate during 
the first half of the period, or even the first three-quarters, 
more distinguished attentions than her mistress ; and the addi- 
tions made to the list headed by Erigena and Anselm, if we allow 
Latin to count, by Bacon and Hobbes, if we stick to the vernacu- 
lar, have been many and great. Yet it would not be unreasonable 
laudation of times past to say that there hardly, after Hume's 
death, arose any philosopher who combined the originality, the 
acuteness, and the literary skill of Hume during the first half 
of this century, while certainly, at least till within a period for- 
bidden to our scheme, the latter part of the time has not seen 
any writer who could vie even with those of the earlier. To 
a certain extent the historical and critical tendencies so often 
noticed have here been unfortunate, inasmuch as they have 
diverted philosophical students from original writing — or at least 
from writing as original as the somewhat narrow and self-repeating 
paths of philosophy admit — to historical and critical exercises. 
But there is also no doubt that the immense authority which the 
too long neglected writers of Germany attained, a little before the 
middle of the century, has been unfortunate in at least one respect, 
if not also in others. The ignorant contempt of technicalities, and 



458 CONCLUSION 



the determination to refer all things to common sense employing 
common language, which distinguished the eighteenth century with 
us, was certain to provoke a reaction ; and this reaction, assisted 
by imitation of the Germans, produced in the decades from 1840 
onwards an ever-increasing tendency among English philosophers 
or students of philosophy to employ a jargon often as merely 
technical as the language of the schoolmen, and not seldom far 
emptier of any real argument. It is not too much to say that if 
the rough methods of Hobbes with a terminology far less fallacious, 
were employed with this jargon, it would look much poorer than 
Bramhall's scholasticisms look in the hands of the redoubtable 
Nominalist. Fortunately of late there have been more signs than 
one of yet another turn of tide, and of a fresh appeal to the communis 
sensus, not it may be hoped of the obstinately and deafly exoteric 
character of the eighteenth century, but such as will refuse to 
pay itself with words, and will exercise a judicious criticism in a 
language understanded of all educated people. Then, and not till 
then, we may expect to meet philosophy that is literature and lit- 
erature that is philosophic. 

Science, that is to say physical science, which has sometimes 
openly boasted itself as about to take, and has much more com- 
monly made silent preparations for taking, the place both of phi- 
losophy and of theology, will hardly be said by the hardiest of her 
adherents to have done very much to justify these claims to seats 
not yet quite vacant from the point of view of the purely literary 
critic. We have had some excellent scientific writers, from Bishop 
Watson to Professor Huxley ; and some of the books of the cen- 
tury which would deserve remembrance and reading, whatever 
their subject matter, have been books of science. Yet it is 
scarcely rash to assert that the essential characteristics of science 
and the essential characteristics of literature are, if not so dia- 
metrically opposed as some have thought, at any rate very far 
apart from one another. Literature can never be scientific ; and 
though science may be literary, yet it is rather in the fashion in 
which a man borrows some alien vesture in order to present 



CONCLUSION 459 



himself, in compliance with decency and custom, at a foreign 
court. Mathematics give us the example — perhaps the only 
example — of pure science, of what all science would be if it 
could, and of what it approaches, ever more nearly, as far as it 
can. It is needless to say that the perfect presentation of mathe- 
matics is in pure symbols, divested of all form and colour, of all 
personal tincture and bias. And it should be equally superfluous 
to add that it is in form and colour, in suggestion of sound rather 
than in precise expression and sense, in personal bias and personal 
tincture, that not merely the attraction but the very essence of 
literature consists. 

By so much as verbal science or scholarship, which would seem 
to be more especially bound to be literature, claims to be and 
endeavours to be strictly scientific, by so much also necessarily 
does it divorce itself from the literature which it studies. This, if 
not an enormously great, is certainly rather a sore evil ; and it is 
one of the most considerable and characteristic signs of the period 
we are discussing. The older scholarship, though sufficiently 
minute, still clung to the literary side proper : it was even, in the 
technical dialect of one of the universities, opposed to "science," 
which word indeed was itself used in a rather technical way. 
The invention of comparative philology, with its even more 
recent off-shoot phonetics, has changed all this, and we now find 
"linguistic" and "literary" used by common consent as things 
not merely different but hostile, with a further tendency on the 
part of linguistics to claim the term " scholarship " exclusively for 
itself. 

This could hardly in any case be healthy. What may be the 
abstract value of the science, or group of sciences, called philology, 
it is perhaps not necessary here to inquire. It is sufficient to say 
that it clearly has nothing to do with literature except in acci- 
dental and remote applications, that it stands thereto much as 
geology does to architecture. Unfortunately, while the scientific 
side of scholarship is thus becoming, if it has not become, wholly 
unliterary, the aesthetic side has shown signs of becoming, to far 



460 CONCLUSION 



too groat an extent, unscientific in the bad and baneful sense. 
With some honourable exceptions, we find critics of literature too 
often divided into linguists who seem neither to think nor to be 
capable of thinking of the meaning or the melody, of the individual 
and technical mastery, of an author, a book, or a passage, and 
into loose aesthetic rhetoricians who will sometimes discourse on 
j Eschylus without knowing a second aorist from an Attic perfect, 
and pronounce eulogies or depreciations on Virgil without having 
the faintest idea whether there is or is not any authority for 
quamvis with one mood rather than another. Nor is it possible 
to see what eirenicon is likely to present itself between two 
parties, of whom the extremists on the one side may justly 
point to such things as have here been quoted, while the ex- 
tremists on the other feel it a duty to pronounce phonetics the 
merest " hariolation," and a very large part of what goes by 
the name of philology ingenious guesswork, some of which may 
possibly not be false, but hardly any of which can on principles of 
sound general criticism be demonstrated to be true. It is not 
wonderful, though it is in the highest degree unhealthy, that the 
stricter scholars should be more or less scornfully relinquishing 
the province of literary criticism altogether, while the looser 
aesthetics consider themselves entitled to neglect scholarship in 
any proper sense with a similarly scornful indifference. 

It is, however, impossible that offences of this sort should not 
come now and then in the history of literature, and fortunately, 
in that history, they disappear as they appear. For the present 
purpose it is more important to conclude this conclusion with a 
i'ew general remarks on the past, fewer on the present, and fewest 
of all on the future. 

On this last head, indeed, no words were perhaps even better 
than even fewest ; though something of the sort may be expected. 
Rash as prophecy always is, it is never quite so rash as in litera- 
ture ; and though we can sometimes, looking backward, say — 
perhaps even then with some rashness — that such and such a 
change might or ought to have been expected, it is very seldom 



xii CONCLUSION 461 

that we can, when deprived of this illegitimate advantage, vatici- 
nate on such subjects with any safety. Yet the study of the 
present always, so to speak, includes and overlaps something of 
the future, and by comparison at least of other presents we can 
discern what it is at least not improbable that the future may be. 
What, then, is the present of literature in England? 

It can be described with the greater freedom that, as con- 
stantly repeated, we are not merely at liberty ex hypo the si to omit 
references to individuals, but are ex hypothesi bound to exclude 
them. And no writer, as it happens rather curiously, of any- 
thing like great promise or performance who was born later than 
the beginning of the fifties has died as yet, though the century 
is so near its close. Yet again, all the greatest men of the 
first quarter of the century, with the single exception of Mr. 
Ruskin, are gone ; and not many of the second remain. By 
putting these simple and unmistakable facts together it will be 
seen, in a fashion equally free from liability to cavil and from 
disobliging glances towards persons, that the present is at best a 
stationary state in our literary history. Were we distinctly on the 
mounting hand, it is, on the general calculation of the liabilities 
of human life, certain that we must have had our Shelley or our 
Keats side by side with our Wordsworth and our Coleridge. 
That we have much excellent work is certain; that we have 
much of the absolutely first class not so. And if we examine 
even the good work of our younger writers we shall find in much 
of it two notes or symptoms — one of imitation or exaggeration, 
the other of uncertain and eccentric quest for novelty — which 
have been already noted above as signs of decadence or transition. 

Whether it is to be transition or decadence, that is the 
question. For the solution of it we can only advance with safety 
a few considerations, such as that in no literary history have 
periods of fresh and first-rate production ever continued longer 
than — that they have seldom continued so long as — the period 
now under notice, and that it is reasonable, it is almost certain, 
that, though by no means an absolutely dead season, yet a period 



462 CONCLUSION 



of comparatively faint life and illustration should follow. To 
this it may be added as a consideration not without philosophical 
weight that the motives, the thoughts, the hopes, the fears, 
perhaps even the manners, which have defrayed the expense of 
the literary production of this generation, together with the lit- 
erary forms in which, according to custom, they have embodied 
and ensconced themselves, have been treated with unexampled, 
certainly with unsurpassed, thoroughness, and must now be near 
exhaustion ; while it is by no means clear that any fresh set is 
ready to take their place. It is on this last point, no doubt, that 
the more sanguine prophets would like to fight the battle, urging 
that new social ideas, and so forth, are in possession of the ground. 
But this is not the field for that battle. 

In dealing with what has been, with the secular hour that we 
have actually and securely had, we are on far safer, if not on 
positively safe ground. Here the sheaves are actually reaped and 
brought home ; and if the teller of them makes a mistake, his 
judgment, and his judgment only, need be at fault. Not all ways 
of such telling are of equal value. It may be tempting, for instance, 
but can hardly be very profitable, to attempt to strike an exact 
balance between the production of the century from 1780 to 1880 
with that of the other great English literary century from 1580 to 
1680. Dear as the exercise is to some literary accountants, there 
is perhaps no satisfactory system of book-keeping by which we 
can really set the assets and the liabilities of the period from the 
appearance of Spenser to the death of Browne against the assets 
and liabilities of that from the appearance of Burns to the death 
of Tennyson, and say which has the greater sum to its credit. 
Still more vague and futile would it be to attempt to set with any 
exactness this balance-sheet against that of the other great literary 
periods of other countries, languages, and times. Here again, most 
emphatically, accuracy of this kind is not to be expected. 

But what we can say with confidence and profit is that the 
nineteenth century in England and English is of these great 
periods, and of the greatest of them ; that it has taken its place 



CONCLUSION 463 



finally and certainly, with a right never likely to be seriously 
challenged, and in a rank never likely to be much surpassed. 

The period which lisped its numbers in Burns and Blake and 
Cowper, which broke out into full song with Wordsworth, Cole- 
ridge, Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, which, not to mention 
scores of minor singers, took up the tale with Tennyson and 
Browning and passed it on to Arnold, Rossetti, Mr. Morris, and 
Mr. Swinburne, need fear no comparisons in the matter of poetry. 
In prose fiction, as we have seen, it stands alone. It is almost 
a century of origins as regards the most important kinds ; it is 
quite a century of capital and classical performance in them. In 
"making" — prose or verse — no time leaves record of perfor- 
mance more distinguished or more various. 

That in one great literary kind, drama, it exhibits lamentable 
deficiency, that indeed in that kind it hardly counts at all, has 
been admitted ; and it is not probable that in any of the serious 
prose kinds, except history, it will ever rank very high when 
compared with others. Its theology has, as far as literature is 
concerned, been a little wanting in dignity, in finish, and even in 
fervour, its philosophy either commonplace or jargonish, its 
exercises in science and scholarship ever divorcing themselves 
further from literary ideals. But in the quality of its miscellane- 
ous writing, as well as in the facilities given to such writing by 
its special growth — some would say its special fungus — of the 
periodical, it again rises to the first class. Hardly the period of 
Montaigne and Bacon, certainly not that of Dryden, Cowley, and 
Temple, nor that of Addison and Steele, nor that of Johnson and 
Goldsmith, can vie with the century of Charles Lamb and William 
Hazlitt, of Leigh Hunt and Thomas de Quincey, of Macaulay and 
Thackeray and Carlyle, of Arnold and Mr. Ruskin. Miscellane- 
ous we have been, — perhaps too much so, — but we should be a 
little saved by the excellence of some of our miscellanists. 

Pessimists would probably say that the distinguishing and not 
altogether favourable notes of the century are a somewhat vagabond 
curiosity in matter and a tormented unrest of style. The former 



464 CONCLUSION 



concerns us little, and is chiefly noticeable here because of the 
effect which it has had on the great transformation of historical 
writing so often noticed ; the latter concerns us intimately. And 
no doubt there is hardly a single feature — not even the growth 
of the novel, not even the development of the newspaper — which 
will so distinctly and permanently distinguish this century in 
English literary history as the great changes which have come 
over style, and especially prose style. There has been less 
opportunity to notice these collectively in any of the former 
chapters than there has been to notice some other changes : nor 
was this of much importance, for the present is the right place for 
gathering up the fragments. 

The change of style in prose is undoubtedly as much the 
leading feature of the century as is in poetry the change of thought 
and outlook, on which latter enough perhaps has been said 
elsewhere ; the whole of our two long chapters on poetry being 
indeed, with great part of this conclusion, a continuous exposi- 
tion of it. But the change in prose was neither confined to, 
nor specially connected with, any single department of literature. 
Indirectly indeed, and distantly, it may be said to have been 
connected with the growth of the essay and the popularity of 
periodicals ; and yet it is not quite certain that this was anything 
more than a coincidence due to the actual fact that the first 
extensive practitioners of ornate prose, Wilson and De Quincey, 
were in a way journalists. 

That the sudden ornateness, in part a mere ordinary reaction, 
was also in part due to a reflection of the greater gorgeousness of 
poetry, though it was in itself less a matter of thought than of 
style, is true. But literary reactions are always in part at least 
literary developments ; and after the prose of Burke and Gibbon, 
even after that of Johnson, it was certain that the excessive plain- 
ness reached in the mid- eighteenth century would be exchanged 
for something else. But it could not possibly have been anti- 
cipated that the change would exhibit the extent or the variety 
that it has actually shown. 



CONCLUSION 465 



That it has enriched English literature with a great deal of 
admirable matter is certain ; that it has not merely produced a 
great deal of sad stuff, but has perhaps inflicted some permanent 
or at least lasting damage on the purity, the simplicity, and in the 
best sense the strength of style, is at least equally certain. It is 
less easy to say whether it is, as a movement, near its close, or 
with what sort of reaction it is likely to be followed. On the one 
hand the indication of particular follies and excesses may not seem 
decisive ; for there is little doubt that in all the stages of this 
flamboyant movement — from De Quincey to Carlyle, from Carlyle 
to Mr. Ruskin, from Mr. Ruskin to persons whom it is unneces- 
sary to mention — the advocates of the sober styles thought and 
said that the force of extravagance could no further go, and that 
the last outrages had been committed on the dignity and simplic- 
ity of English. On the other hand there are signs, which are very 
unlikely to deceive the practised critic, tending to show that the 
mode is likely to change. When actual frippery is seen hanging 
up in Monmouth Street or Monmouth Street's successors, when 
cheap imitations of fashionable garments crowd the shop windows 
and decorate the bodies of the vulgar — then the wise know 
that this fashion will shortly change. And certainly something 
similar may be observed in literature to-day. Cacophony jostles 
preciousness in novel and newspaper ; attempts at contorted 
epigram appear side by side with slips showing that the writer 
has not the slightest knowledge of the classics in the old sense, 
and knows exceedingly little of anything that can be called classic 
in the widest possible acceptation of the term. Tyrannies cease 
when the cobblers begin to fear them ; fashions, especially literary 
fashions, when the cobblers take them up. 

Yet the production of what must or may be called literature is 
now so large, and in consequence of the spread of what is called 
education the appetite so largely exceeds the taste for it, that it is 
not so easy as it would once have been to forecast the extent and 
validity of any reaction that may take place. 

If, without undue praising of times past, without pleading 



466 CONCLUSION 



guilty to the prejudices sometimes attributed to an academic 
education, and also without trespassing beyond the proper limits 
of this book, it may be permitted to express an opinion on the 
present state of English literature, that opinion, while it need 
not be very gloomy, can hardly be very sanguine. And one 
ground for discouragement, which very especially concerns us, lies 
in the fact that on the whole we are now too "literary." Not, as 
has been said, that the general taste is too refined, but that there 
is a too indiscriminate appetite in the general ; not that the actual 
original force of our writers is, with rare exceptions, at all alarm- 
ing, but that a certain amount of literary craftsmanship, a certain 
knowledge of the past and present of literature, is with us in a 
rather inconvenient degree. The public demands quantity, not 
quality ; and it is ready, for a time at any rate, to pay for its 
quantity with almost unheard of returns, both, as the homely old 
phrase goes, in praise and in pudding. And the writer, though 
seldom hampered by too exact an education in form, has had 
books, as a rule, too much with him. Sometimes he simply 
copies, and knows that he copies ; oftener, without knowing it, he 
follows and imitates, while he thinks that he is doing original 
work. 

And worse than all this, the abundance of reading has created 
an altogether artificial habit — a habit quite as artificial as any 
that can ever have prevailed at other periods — of regarding the 
main stuff and substance of literature. Much reading of novels, 
which are to the ordinary reader his books, and his only books, 
has induced him to take their standards as the standards of both 
nature and life. And this is all the more dangerous because in 
all probability the writers of these very novels have themselves 
acquired their knowledge, formed their standards, in a manner 
little if at all more first-hand. We have nature, not as Jones or 
Brown saw it for himself, but as he saw it through the spectacles 
of Mr. Ruskin or of Jefferies ; art, not as he saw it himself, but 
as he saw it through those of Mr. Ruskin again or of Mr. Pater ; 
literary criticism as he learnt it from Mr. Arnold or from Sainte- 



CONCLUSION 467 



Beuve ; criticism of life as he took it from Thackeray or from 
Mr. Meredith. 

Something like this has occurred at least three times before in 
the history of European literature. It happened in late Graeco- 
Roman times, and all the world knows what the cure was then, 
and how the much-discussed barbarian cleared the mind of 
Europe of its literary cant by very nearly clearing out all the 
literature as well. It happened on a much smaller scale, and with 
a less tremendous purgation, at the close of the Middle Ages, 
when the world suddenly, as it were, shut up one library and 
opened another ; and at the end of the seventeenth and beginning 
of the eighteenth century, when it shut both of these or the greater 
part of them, and took to a small bookshelf of " classics," a 
slender stock of carefully observed formulae and — common sense. 

What it will take to now, nobody can say ; but that it will in 
one fashion or another change most of its recent wear, shut most 
of its recent books, and perhaps give itself something of a holi- 
day from literature, except in scholastic shapes, may be not quite 
impossible. Another Lyrical Ballads may be coming for this 
decade, as it came a hundred years ago : all we can say is that it 
apparently has not come yet. But whether it does come or does 
not, the moment is certainly no bad one, even if chronology did 
not make it inviting, for setting in order the actual, the certain, 
the past and registered production of the century since the dawn 
of the great change which ended its vigil. The historian, as he 
closes his record, is only too conscious of the objections to 
omission that may probably be brought against him, and of those 
of too liberal admission which certainly will be brought. It is 
possible that for some tastes even this chapter may not contain 
enough of 7>/;^/<?;/s-discussion, that they may miss the broader 
sweeps and more confident generalisations of another school 
of criticism. But the old objection to fighting with armour 
which you have not proved has always seemed a sound one, and 
has seldom failed to be justified of those who set it at nought. 
Careful arrangement of detail and premiss, cautious drawing of 



468 CONCLUSION 



conclusions, and constant subjection of these conclusions to that 
process of literary comparison which I believe to be the strongest, 
the safest, the best engine of literary criticism altogether — these 
are the things which I have endeavoured to observe here. It 
might have shown greater strength of mind to reject a large 
number of the authors here named, and so bring the matter into 
case for more extended treatment of interesting individuals. But 
there is something, as it seems to me, a little presumptuous in 
a too peremptory anticipation of the operations of Time the 
Scavenger. The critic may pretty well foresee the operations of the 
wallet-bearer, but he is not to dictate to him the particular " alms 
for oblivion " which he shall give. As it used to be the custom 
for a dramatic author, even though damned, to have his entrees 
at the theatre, so those who have once made an actual figure 
on the literary stage are entitled, until some considerable time has 
elapsed, to book-room. They lose it gradually and almost 
automatically ; and as I have left out many writers of the end of 
last century whom, if I had been writing sixty years since, I should 
doubtless have put in, many of the first half of it whom I should 
have admitted if I had been writing thirty years since, so in 
another generation others will no doubt exercise a similar thin- 
ning on my own passed or pressed men. 

But few, however, I think, appear here without more or less right 
of admission to the mind-map of the century's literature which 
a well-furnished mind should at this moment contain. That such 
a mind-map, quite irrespective of examinations and lecture-courses, 
and of literary bread-study generally, is a valuable thing, I have 
no doubt. And I think, without wishing to magnify mine office, 
that the general possession of it might do something to counteract 
these disastrous influences which have been referred to a little 
earlier. A man should surely be a little less apt to take the 
pinchbeck poetry of his own day for gold when he remembers 
the Delia Cruscans and Sentimentalists, the Montgomerys and the 
Tuppers ; the terror-novel and the Minerva Press should surely 
be useful skeletons to him at his feast of fiction in kinds which it 



CONCLUSION 469 



would be beyond my province to describe more particularly. He 
will not clamour, as I have known very excellent persons clamour, 
for the " raising of English to a new power " when he has before him 
the long procession of ingenious jargonists whose jargon has been 
in its turn hailed as a revelation and dismissed as an old song. 
And he will neither overexalt the dignity of literature, nor be a 
self-tormentor and a tormentor of others about its approaching 
decline and fall, when he sees how constantly, how incessantly, the 
kissed mouth has renewed its freshness, the apparently dying 
flower has shed seed and shot suckers for a new growth. 



INDEX 



(It has been endeavoured in this Index to include the name (with dates) of every 
author, and the title of every book, discussed in detail. But in order to avoid 
unnecessary bulk, books and authors merely referred to, as well as parts of 
books, are not usually given.) 



AC A DEMY, 383 

Adam Bede, 322 sq. 

Adam Blair, 194 

Age of Reason, The, 30 sq. 

Ainsworth, Harrison (1805-82), 138, 

139 
Alison, Sir Archibald (1792-1867), 217, 

218 
Allingham, William (1824-89), 307 
Alton Locke, 326 sq. 
Ancient Law, 358 
Ancient Mariner, The Rime of the, 

61-63 
Andromeda, 325 
Anna St. Ives, 39 
Annals of the Parish, 140 
Anti-Jacobin, 2 

Apologia pro I'itcl Sua, 327, 368 
Arnold, Matthew (1822-88), 15, 52, 

281-287, 385-388 
Arnold, Thomas (1795-1842), 223, 224 
Ashe, Thomas, 1836-89, 313 
Asolando, 271 sq. 
AthencBiun, 383 

Atherstone, Edwin (1788-1872), 124 
Aurora Leigh, 280 

Austen, Jane (1775-1817), 43, 128-131 
Austen, Lady, 4 

Austin, John (1790-1859), 357, 358 
Austin, Sarah (1793-1867), 358 
Aytoun, William Edmonstoune (1813- 

65). 3° 2 -3°4 

Bage, Robert (1728-1801), 41, 42 



Bagehot, Walter (1826-77), 383-384 
Baillie, Joanna (1762-1851), 419, 420 
Barbauld, Mrs. (1743-1825), 19, 62 
Barchcster Towers, 330 
Barham, Richard Harris (1788-1845), 

209, 210 
Barnaby Rudge, 149 
Barnes, William (1800-86), 118 
Barry Cornwall, see Procter, B. W. 
Barrow, Sir John (1764-1848), 179 
Barton, Bernard (1784-1849), 107 
Baynes, Thomas Spencer (1823-87), 351 
Beckford, William (1759-1844), 40, 41 
Beddoes, Thomas Lovell (1803-49), 

114-116 
Bells and Pomegranates, 270 
Bentham, Jeremy (1748-1832), 343, 

344 
Biographia Borealis, 201 
Blackie, John Stuart (1809-95), 3°° 
Blackwood's Magazine, 168 sqq. 
Blake, William (1757-1827), 1-3,9-13 
Bleak House, 150 

Bloomfield, Robert (1766-1823), 1:07 
Bon Gaultier Ballads, 303 
Borrow, George (1803-81), 162, 163 
Bowles, Caroline (1787-1854), 65, 124 
Bowles, William Lisle (1762-1850), 19, 

105, 106 
Brimley, George (1819-57), 383, 384 
Bronte, Anne (1820-49), 319 
Bronte, Charlotte (1816-55), 319-321 
Bronte, Emily (1818-48), 315, 321 
Brown, Dr. John (1810-82), 384 



471 



472 



INDEX 



Browning, Elizabeth Barrett (1809-61), 

276-281 
Browning, Robert (1812-89), 90, 268- 

277 
Bryant, Jacob (1715-1804), 405 
Buckle, Henry Thomas (1821-62), 243, 

244 
Bulwer, see Lytton 

Burges, Sirjames Bland (1752-1824) , 48 
Burke, 1, 7 

Burney, Miss (1752-1840), 125 
Burns, Robert (1759-96), 1-3, 9, 10, 

13-18 
Burton, John Hill (1809-81), 240 
Burton, Sir Richard (1821-90), vi 
Byron, 6 
Byron, Lord (1788-1824), 6, 75-81 

CALEB WILLIAMS, 32 sq. 

Calverley, Charles Stuart (1831-84), 314 

Campbell, Mr. Dykes, 57 

Campbell, Thomas (1777-1844), 92-94 

Canning, George (1770-1827), 19 

Carlyle, Thomas (1795-1881), 232-240 

Cary, Henry (1772-1844), no 

Castle Rackrent, 127 

Chalmers, Thomas (1780-1847), 374, 

375 
Chambers, Robert (1802-71), 414 
Chamier, Captain, 159 
Chartism, 235 sqq. 
Christabel, 61-63 
Christian Year, 362-364 
" Christopher North," see Wilson, 

John 
Church, Richard (1815-90), 371 
Churchill, 3, 5 

City of Dreadful Night, The, 298 
Clive, Mrs. Archer (1801-73), 3° 2 
Cloister and the Hearth, The, 332 
Clough, Arthur Hugh (1819-61), 309, 

310 
Cobbett, William (1762-1835), 2, 168- 

172 
Coleridge, Hartley (1796-1849), 51, 

200-203 
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834), 

56-63 
Coleridge, Sara (1802-52), 119 
Collins, Charles Alston (182S-73), 333 
Collins, Mortimer (1827-76), 307 
Collins, Wilkie (1824-89), 333 



Combe, William (1741-1823), 47 
Confessions of a Justified Sinner, 100 
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, 

145 sq. 
Congreve, 6 

Conington, John (1825-69), 407, 408 
Cornhill Magazine, 382 
" Corn-Law Rhymer, The," see Elliott, 

Ebenezer 
Cornwall, Barry, see Procter, B. W. 
Cory, William, see Johnson, William 
Cottle, Joseph (i770-i853),.57 
Cowper, William (1731-1800), 1-7 
Coxe, Archdeacon, 252 note 
Crabbe, George (1754-1832), 1-3, 7-9 
Craik, Dinah Maria (1826-87), 33 6 
Cranford, 335 

Croker, Crofton (1798-1854), 141 
Croker, John Wilson (1780-1857), 383 
Crotchet Castle, 162 
Cruise upon Wheels, A, 333 
Cumberland, Richard (1732-1811), 42 
Cunningham, Allan (1784-1842), 108 
Curiosities of Literature, 179 

DANIEL DERONDA, 324 
DArblay, Madame (1752-1840), 125 
Darley, George (1795-1846), 114 
Darwin, Charles Robert (1809-82), 

412-414 
Darwin, Erasmus (1731-1802), 3, 19,412 
David Copperfield, 150 
Davy, Sir Humphry (1778-1829), 410, 

411 
Death's Jest-Book, 115 
" Delia Crusca," see Merry 
" Delta," see Moir, D. M. 
De Quincey, Thomas (1785-1859), 194- 

198 
Dickens, Charles (1812-70), 145-151 
Digby, Kenelm, vi 

Disraeli, Benjamin (1804-81), 160, 161 
Disraeli, Isaac (1766-1848), 179 
Dobell, Sydney (1824-74), 304-307 
Dombey and Son, 149 
Domett, Alfred (1811-87), 302 
Doyle, Sir Francis (1810-88), 206 
Dramatis Personce, 271 sqq. 
Dream of Gerontius, The, 267 
Dryden, 5, 8 

Dufferin, Lady (1807-67), 315 
Dunbar, 9 



INDEX 



473 



Edgeworth, Maria (1767-1849) , 126- 
128 

Edinburgh Review, 167 sqq. 

Eli a, The Essays of, 182 

Eliot, George, see Evans, Mary Ann 

Elliott, Ebenezer (" The Corn-Law 

Rhymer") (1781-1849), no, ill 
Ellis, George (1753-18 15), 20 
Emerson, 68 
Enoch Arden, 265 
Eothen, 241 

Epic of Women, The, 295 
Esmond, 152, 155 
Essays and Reviews, 373 
Essays in Criticism, 385 
" Ettrick Shepherd," The, 100 
Evans, Mary Ann (1819-80), 316, 321- 

324 
Examiner, 98, 168 sq. 

FAZIO, 421 

Ferguson, 15 

Ferguson, Sir Samuel (1810-86), 302 

Ferrier, James Frederick (1808-64), 

35i 
Ferrier, Susan (1782-1854), 351 
Finlay, George (1795-1875), 252 note 
FitzGerald, Edward (1809-83), 207- 

209 
Forster, John (1812-76), 242, 243 
Fortnightly Review, 382 
Foster, John (1770-1843), vi 
" Fraserians," The, 204 
Eraser's Magazine, 168 sqq., 203 sq. 
Frederick the Great, History of, 235 

sqq. 
Freeman, Edward Augustus (1823-92), 

244, 245 
French Revolution, History of the, 

234 sqq. 
Frere, John Hookham, 19 
Froude, James Anthony (1818-94), 

246-252 
Froude, Richard Hurrell (1803-36), 370 

Galt, John (1779-1839), 139-141 
Gamekeeper at Home, The, 396 
Gaskell, Mrs. (1810-65), 335 
Gibbon, 1 

Gifford, William (1756-1826), 19, 23-25 
Gilpin, William (1724-1804), 46, 47 
Glascock, Captain, 159 



Godwin, William (1756-1836), 2, 32-37 

Goldsmith, 1 

Gray, 6 

Great Expectations, 150 

Green, John Richard (1837-83), 245, 

246 
Greenwell, Dora (1821-82), 316 
Greville, Charles, vi 
Grosart, Dr., 52 note 
Grote, George (1794-1871), 220-222 
Guy Livingstone, 335 

Hake, Thomas Gordon (1809-94), 

301 
Hall, Captain Basil (1788-1844), 159 
Hallam, Henry (1777-1859), 212-214 
Hallam, Arthur Henry (1811-33), 299, 

300 
Hamilton, Sir William (1788-1856), 

349-3S 2 
Hannay, James (1827-73), 383 
Hard Times, 150 

Haunted and the Haunters, The, 143 
Hawker, Robert Stephen (1803-75), 118 
Hayley, William (1745-1820), 3, 18, 19 
Hayward, Abraham (1801-84), 383 
Hazlitt, William (1778-1830), 34, 184- 

187 
Head, Sir Edmund (1805-68), 206 
Head, Sir Francis (1793-1875), 206 
Headley, Henry (1765-88), 47, 106 note 
Heber, Reginald (1783-1826), no 
Helps, Sir Arthur (1813-75), 384 
Hemans, Mrs. (1793-1835), 112 
Henrietta Temple, 161 
Heroes and Hero- Worship, 235 sq. 
Hogg, James (1770-1835), 99-101 
Hogg, T. J., 82 

Holcroft, Thomas (1745-1809), 38, 39 
Hood, Thomas (1799-1845), 121-124 
Hook, Theodore (1788-1841), 140, 141 
Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844-90), 294 
Home, Richard H. (1803-84), 117 
Home Tooke (1736-1812), 46 
Houghton, Lord (Milnes, R. M.) (1809- 

85). 3 OI > 3 02 
Household Words, 379, 380 
Hunt, Leigh (1784-1859), 81, 86, 88; 

his verse and life, 98, 99 ; his prose, 

198-200 
Huxley, Thomas Henry (1825-95), 415, 

416 



474 



INDEX 



IDEAL of a Christian Church, The, 371 

Idylls of the King, 264, 265 

Imaginary Conversations, 102 sq. 

Imaginary Portraits, 399 

Ingoldsby Legends, The, 210 

In Memoriam, 262, 263 

Ion, 421 

Irving, Edward (1792-1834), 375 

// is Never too Late to Mend, 332 

James, G. P. R. (1801-60), 138, 139 
Jameson, Mrs. (1794-1860), 397 
Jane Eyre, 318 
Jefferies, John Richard (1848-87), 396, 

397 
Jeffrey, Francis (1773-1850), 71, 172- 

176 
Jerrold, Douglas (1803-57), 210 
Johnson, S., 1, 6, 8 
Johnson, William (1784-1864), 246 
Jones, Ebenezer (1820-60), 307 
(ones, Ernest (1819-68), 307 
Jowett, Benjamin (1817-93), 374 

Keats, John (1795-1821), 86-91 
Keble, John (1792-1866), 362-364 
Kinglake, Alexander (1809-91), 241, 

242 
Kingsley, Charles (1819-75), 324-328 
Kingsley, Henry (1830-76), 333, 334 
Knowles, James Sheridan (1784-1862), 

422 
Kubla Khan, 61-63 

LADY OF LYONS, THE, 423 
Lamb, Charles (1775-1834), 13,33,38, 

181-184 
Lancaster, Henry (1829-75), 3^4 
Landon, Letitia Elizabeth, " L. E. L." 

(1802-38), 118, 119 
Landor, Walter Savage (1775-1864), 

68, 101-104 
Latin Christianity, History of, 220 
Latter-Day Pamphlets, 235 sqq. 
Lawrence, Dr., 21 
Lawrence, George Alfred (1827-76), 

334, 335 
Lays of Ancient Rome, 226, 227 
Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers, 303 
Lear, Edward (1812-88), 313, 314 
Lee, the Misses, 45 
Lever, Charles (1806-72), 158, 159 



Levy, Amy (1861-89), 3 10 

Lewes, George Henry (1817-78), 354, 

355 
Lewis, Sir George Cornewall (1806- 

63), 206, 207 
Lewis, Matthew ("Monk") (1775- 

18 18), 2, 44 
Liddon, Henry Parry (1829-90), 371 
Life Dra?na, A, 305 
Lingard, John (1771-1851), 215 
Little Dorr it, 150 
Lloyd (the elder), 3 
Lloyd, Charles (1775-1839), 181 
Locker, Frederick (1821-95), 309, 310 
Lockhart, John Gibson (1794-1854), 

191-194; his Life of Scott, 193 
London Magazine, 168 sqq. 
Long, George (1800-79), 407 
Lyrical Ballads, 48, 56 
Lytton, the first Lord (1803-73), 142- 

145. 422, 423 
Lytton, Edward Robert, first Earl of 
(1831-91), 310-312 

Macaulay, Thomas Babington 

(1800-59), 34, 67, 68, 224-232 
M'Crie, Thomas (1772-1835), 216, 217 
Mackay, Charles (1814-89), 302 
Mackenzie, 17, 18 
Mackintosh, Sir James (1765-1832), 

345 
Macmillan s Magazine, 382 
Maginn, William (1793-1842), 203-205 
Mahon, Lord, see Stanhope 
Maine, Sir Henry ). S. (1822-88), 357, 

358 
Malone, Edmund (1741-1812), 47 
Malthus, Thomas Robert (1766-1834), 

46 
Mangan, James Clarence (1803-49), 118 
Manning, Henry Edward (1808-92), 

37o 
Mansel, Henry Longueville (1820-71), 

352-354 
Marius the Epicurean, 400 
Marryat, Frederick (1792-1848), 157, 

158 
Marston, Philip Bourke (1850-87), 294, 

297 
Marston, Westland (1819-90), 424 
Martin Chuzzlewit, 149 
Martineau, Harriet (1802-76), 163, 164 



INDEX 



475 



Mathias, Thomas James (17547-1835), 

20, 23, 25, 26 
Maturin, Charles Robert (1782-1824), 

125, 126 
Maud, 263, 264 
Maurice, Frederick Denison (1805-72), 

354. 375 
Maxwell, Sir William Stirling (1818-78), 

252 note 
Melmoth the Wanderer, 126 
Men and Women, 271 sq. 
Merivale, Charles (1808-93), 240, 241 
Merry, Robert (" Delia Crusca") (1755- 

98), 19, 24 note 
Mill, James (1773-1836), 345 
Mill, John Stuart (1806-73), 344-349 
Miller, Hugh (1802-56), 414, 415 
Milman, Henry Hart (1791-1868), 219, 

220 
Milnes, R. M., see Houghton, Lord 
Minto, William (1845-93), 402 
Mitford, Mary Russell (1787-1855), 164, 

165 
Mitford, William (1744-1827), 215 
Modern British Theatre, 417 
Modern Painters, 389 
Moir, D. M. (" Delta") (1798-1851), 140 
Monk, The, 44 

Montgomery, James (1771-1854), 107 
Montgomery, Robert (1807-55), ^7 

note 
Moore, John (1729-1802), 2, 26-28 
Moore, Thomas (1779-1852), 94-98 
More, Hannah (1745-1833), 45 
Morris, Mr., 90 

Motherwell, William (1797-1835), 109 
Movement, The Oxford, 342 sq. 
Munro, Hugh A. J. (1819-85), 408 
Music and Moonlight, 295 

Napier, Sir William (1785-1860), 212 

Newcomes, The, 152, 155 

Newman, John Henry (1801-90), 364- 

370 
Nicholas Nickleby, 148 
Nodes AmbrosiancB, 188 
Noel, Roden (1834-94), 312, 313 
Norton, Mrs. (1808-77), 315 

ODE on Intimations of Immortality, 54 
O'Keefe, John (1747-1833), 46, 418-419 
Old Curiosity Shop, The, 149 



Oliphant, Laurence, vi 

Oliver Cromwell 's Letters and Speeches, 

235 ^h 
Oliver Twist, 148 
Orion, 117 
O'Shaughnessy, Arthur (1844-81), 294- 

296 
Our Mutual Friend, 150 
Our Village, 164 

Paine, Thomas (1737-1809), 2, 30-32 
Palgrave, Mr., 87 

Palgrave, Sir Francis (1788-1861), 216 
Palgrave, William Giflord (1826-88), 

216 
Pall Mall Gazette, 383 
Paracelsus, 269, 270 
Past and Present, 255, sqq. 
Patchwork, 309, 310 
Pater, Walter H. (1839-94) , 398-401 
Pattison, Mark (1813-84), 373, 374 
Paul, Mr. Regan, 34 
Paul Ferroll, 341 
Pauline, 269 
Peacock, Thomas Love (1785-1866), 

161, 162 
Pelham, 143 
Pendennis, 152, 155 
Peter Plymley's Letters, 177 
Peter ' s Letters, 192, 194 
Philip Van Artevelde, 119 
Pickwick Papers, The, 146 
Pindar, Peter, see Wolcot, John 
Planche, James R. (1796-1880), 423 
Plays on the Passions, 419 
Poetical Sketches, 10, n 
Political jtusfice, 32 sq. 
Pollock, Sir F. (1815-88), 207 
Pope, 5, 7 

Porson, Richard (1759-1808), 406, 407 
Praed, Winthrop Markworth (1802-39), 

121-124 
Prcelectiones Academicce, 364 
Price, 26 

Pride and Prejudice, 129 
Priestley, 2, 26 
Princess, The, 261, 262 
Procter, Adelaide Anne (1825-64), 316 
Procter, B. W. ("Barry Cornwall") 

(1790-1874), 109 
Prolegomena Logica, 353 
Prowse, W. J. (1836-70), 314 



476 



INDEX 



Pursuits of Literature, The, 25, 26 
Pusey, Edward Bouverie (1800-82), 

360-362 
Pusey, Philip (1799-1855), 207 
Pye, 19 

Q I r AR TERL Y RE VIE W, 168 sq. 

Radcliffe, Mrs. (1764-1823), 2, 43, 44 

Ravenshoe, 334 

Reade, Charles (1814-84), 331-333 

Reeve, Henry, vi 

Renaissance in Italy, The, 401 

Rights of Man, The, 30 sq. 

Rights of Woman, The, 37, 38 

Ring and the Book, The, 271 sq. 

Robertson, Frederick (1816-53), 37^> 

377 
Robinson, H. Crabb, vi 
Rogers, Samuel (1763-1855), 91, 92 
Rolliad, The, 20, 21 
Roman Poets of the Republic, 408 
Rondeaux , 21 

Roscoe, William (1753-1831), 214 
Rossetti, D. G. (1828-82), 97, 288- 

292 ' 
Rossetti, Miss (1830-94), 293, 294 
Ruskin, John (1819), v, 388-397 

SARTOR RESARTUS,v&sqq. 

Saturday Review, 380, 381 

Sayers, Dr. (1763-1817), 19, 45 

Sayings and Doings, 141 

Schiller, Life of, 233 sqq. 

Scots, the literary virtues of, 15 ; poets 

in, 13-18, 108, 109 
Scott, John (1730-83), 185 
Scott, Michael (1789-1835), 160 
Scott, Sir Walter (1771-1832), 34, 63, 

69-75. i3 I - I 3 8 
Scott, William Bell (1811-90), 302 
Seeley, Sir J. R. (1834-94), 252 note 
Sellar, William Young (1825-90), 408, 

409 
Senior, Nassau W. (1790-1864), 383 
Seward, Miss (1747-1809), 19 
Shairp, Principal (1819-85), 15 
Shelley, Mrs. (1798-1851), 38 
Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822) , 81-86 
Skene, William Forbes (1809-92), 240 
Smedley, Frank E. (1818-64), 337 
Smedley, Menella Bute (1820-77), 316 



Smith, Alexander (1830-67), 304-307 
Smith, Sydney (1771-1845), 176-178 
Smith, William Robertson (1846-94), 

409, 410 
Somerville, Mrs. (1780-1872), 411 
Songs of Innocence and Experience, n, 

12 
Sordello, 270 
Southey, Robert (1774-1843), 3, 13, 

63-69, 107, no 
Spectator, 380 
Stanhope, Philip Henry, Earl (1805- 

75). 246 
Stanley, Arthur Penrhyn (1815-81), 372 
Stephen, James Kenneth (1859-92) . 314 
Stephen, Sir James (1789-1859), 358 
Stephen, Sir lames Fitzjames (1829- 

94). 358 
" Sterling Club," The, 206 sq. 
Sterling, John (1806-44), 205, 206, 300 
Sterling, Life of John, 205, 235 sqq. 
Stevenson, Robert Louis (1850-94), 

338-34 1 

St. Leon, 34, 36 

Story without an End, A, 341 

Strafford, 270 

Studies in the History of the Renais- 
sance, 398 sqq. 

Surtees, Robert (? -1864), 336 

Swift, 6 

Swinburne, Mr., 90 

Symonds, John Addington (1840-93), 
294, 401, 402 

Syntax, Dr., 47 

TALE OF TWO CITIES, A, 150 
Tales of a Grandfather, 212 
Tamworth Rcading-Room, 369 
Tannahill, Robert (1774-1810), 108 
Taylor, Sir Henry (1800-86), 119-121 
Taylor, Thomas (the Platonist) (1758- 

1835), 46 
Taylor, William (of Norwich) (1765- 

1836), 45 
Tennant, William (1784-1S48), 109 
Tennyson, Alfred (1809-92), 89, 90, 

253-268 
Thackeray, William Makepeace (1811- 

6 3 ),i5i-i56 
Thirlwall, Connop (1797-1875), 220-222 
Thorn, William (1789-1848), 109 
Thomson, James (1834-82), 296-298 



INDEX 



477 



Tracts for the Times, 361 

Treasure Island, 339 

Trench, Richard Chenevix (1807-86), 

300 
Trollope, Anthony (1815-82), 329, 330 
Trollope, Mrs. (1780-1863), 329 
Trollope, Thomas Adolphus (1810-92), 

3 2 9 
Tupper, Martin Farquhar (1810-89), 299 
Turner, Sharon (1768-1847), 215, 216 
Twisleton, Edward (1809-74), 207 
Tyndall, John (1820-93), 4 12 
Tytler, Alexander (1747-18 13), 217 
Tytler^ Patrick Fraser (1791-1849), 217 
Tytler, William (1711-92), 217 

UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER, 

The, 148 
Unto this Last, 391 

VANITY FAIR, 155 

Vat he k, 41 

Venables, George S. (18 11-88), 207 

Vere, Sir Aubrey de (1788-1846), 11 1 

Verses and Translations, 314 

Vestiges of Creation, 414 

Virginians, The, 155 

Wade, Thomas (1805-75), 113 
Wainewright, Thomas Griffiths (1794- 
1852), 198 



Wakefield, Gilbert (1756-1801), 405 

Walpole, 1, 6 

Ward, William George (1812-82), 371 

Waverley Novels, The, 131-138 

Wells, Charles Jeremiah (1800-79), rl 3 

Weshvard Ho ! 326 si/. 

Whately, Richard (1787-1863), 355, 356 

Whewell, William (1794-1866), 356 

White, Henry Kirke (1785-1806), 107, 

108 
Whitehead, Charles (1804-62), 113 
Whyte-Melville, Major (1821-78), 336, 

337 

Wilberforce, Samuel (1805-73), 371, 372 
Williams, Helen Maria (1762-1827), 29, 

30 
Williams, Isaac (1802-65), 370, 371 
Wilson, John (1785-1854), 188-191 
Wolcot, John (" Peter Pindar ") (1738- 

1819), 20, 21-23 
Wolfe, Charles (1791-1823), 124 
Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-97), 37. 3 8 
Wordsworth, Dorothy (1771-1855), 50, 

54 
Wordsworth, William (1770-1850), 49- 

56 

YEAST, 326 sq. 

Young, Arthur (1741-1820), 2, 28, 29 

ZELUCO, 26, 27,28 



THE HISTORY 



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